


Template Contagion

by hobbitdragon



Series: Borderlands fics [2]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Characters who die in canon also die in this AU, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Jack gets a new body based on brain scans from Rhys, Love/hate relationships, M/M, Sexual Harassment, Trauma, Vaughn is somewhere on the aro/ace/demi spectrum, Verbal Abuse, and Finch and Kroger, by which I mean Vasquez and Vallory, not a Handsome Jack woobification fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-01-31 01:48:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21438178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hobbitdragon/pseuds/hobbitdragon
Summary: In the end both Jack and the scientists had to compromise. Jack didn’t want to lose memories again, which meant they couldn’t just use the brain scans Nakayama had made. So, they scanned Rhys’s brain while Jack took his body over, and cadged that together with the scans Nakayama had used to produce the AI to begin with.Creating Jack’s body was every bit as difficult, because the fast travel stations and New-U stations auto-deleted their information every few hours to keep from filling up their memory, and the Vault Hunters had smashed the one nearest to the Vault anyway to keep Jack from using it. It seemed like they might hit a dead-end.Finally, Jack himself discovered scans of his whole body among Nakayama’s other Hyperion files. He wasn’t happy finding them, because the implications of why they were there were unsavory. But at least it meant the scientists had something to work with.Using those, programmed with Jack’s genetic code and the scans of Rhys and Jack’s combined brains, the science team digistructed a new body, removed the AI from Rhys, and hoped.It worked.Or at least, it seemed to.
Relationships: Handsome Jack/Rhys (one-sided), Handsome Jack/Vaughn (one-sided), Rhys/Vaughn (Borderlands)
Series: Borderlands fics [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1583899
Comments: 24
Kudos: 44





	1. It seemed to work

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting this in chunks in the hope that having parts of it online will give me the motivation I need to write the rest of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an AU from the canon events of TFTBL starting when Rhys, Sasha, and Fiona arrive on Helios. This AU assumes that Vaughn was sent up with them, and that Rhys trusted Jack in the Gortys facility.
> 
> CONTENT WARNING: this is an AU about Jack, but it's not an AU where Jack's character or behavior is better than it is in canon. All the content warnings that could apply to Jack in canon apply here. He is overtly manipulative and controlling, he's insulting and cruel, he's sexually aggressive and inappropriate, and he does all these things over and over again while the people around him are often helpless to stop it. So please mind your own needs in reading or not reading this.

The cyberneticists and neurologists of Helios (and some flown in from other parts of Hyperion too, just for good measure) were all terrified. 

They could get Jack into a machine. They could load him into a Loaderbot, for example, and did, whereupon he launched rockets at some of the workers and laughed. But Jack didn’t want to be in a Loaderbot. 

The beautiful golden robot body Jack had in his office built went better, at least for other people (it had no rockets). But it ran into the same problem as the Loaderbot: other than its utility as a vehicle to move his mind around, it wasn’t what Jack wanted. 

Jack wanted to fuck and get high and do all the things a _ human _ body could do. While he admitted privately to Rhys that even a robot body was an improvement over having no body at all, he said there was no comparison to how it felt to be in a human body. 

Rhys’s, for example. So Jack went back to being inside Rhys. 

At that point Jack tried to simply take over Rhys’s body. Rhys had no awareness of this at first, for which he was very grateful, because even the idea of it and the knowledge that it had happened were bad enough. But Jack found that he could only hold control of the biological aspects of Rhys’ body for about five minutes at a time. So for the week while the scientists frantically worked on a solution Rhys would black out for a few minutes a few times every day. 

Once Rhys woke up covered in blood. It turned out to belong to one of the scientists, who had suggested Jack just settle for living in the golden robot. Another time Rhys found Finch and Kroger dead at his feet and turrets hanging down from the ceiling all around him. 

In the end both Jack and the scientists had to compromise. Jack didn’t want to lose memories again, which meant they couldn’t just use the brain scans Nakayama had made. So, they scanned Rhys’s brain while Jack took his body over and cadged that together with the scans Nakayama had used to produce the AI to begin with. 

Creating Jack’s body was every bit as difficult, because the fast travel stations and New-U stations auto-deleted their information every few hours to keep from filling up their memory, and the Vault Hunters had smashed the one nearest to the Vault anyway to keep Jack from using it. It seemed like they might hit a dead-end.

Finally, Jack himself discovered scans of his whole body among Nakayama’s other Hyperion files. He wasn’t happy finding them, because the implications of why they were there were unsavory. But at least it meant the scientists had something to work with. 

Using those, programmed with Jack’s genetic code and the scans of Rhys and Jack’s combined brains, the science team digistructed a new body, removed the AI from Rhys, and hoped. 

It worked. 

Or at least, it seemed to.


	2. Promotion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to get through a lot of setup very quickly in this chapter, so it's perhaps not a stellar piece of writing as a result. Eh.

Rhys returned from his week-long stay in R&D to find Loaderbot, Yvette, and Gortys all gathered in the living room of the apartment he shared with Vaughn. Loaderbot--or LB, to distinguish him from all the other Loaderbots--had gotten loaded into a brand new body, so he was shiny and new and fully functional once more. 

He didn’t fit very well into the small apartment but he didn’t seem bothered by this. He had apparently been a hat-rack for months in the publicity department, and compared to that, Rhys supposed low ceilings were less of a problem. 

They had a little party that night for Rhys’s return, though neither Gortys nor LB knew why Rhys had been gone to begin with. Rhys’s shoulders hurt from the tension of the week, a stabbing headache running through his skull starting around the base of his port. But as the evening wore on, it lessened a little, and by the time he and Vaughn waved goodbye at their apartment door (LB and Gortys both left stay with Yvette, who had more room in her apartment) Rhys felt almost normal. 

The next day, Rhys and LB showed Gortys around Helios. As they walked, or caught transit around the station, Rhys realized how strange it was that Gortys was allowed to roam around at all. Rhys would have figured that Jack wouldn’t let most of a Vault key go wandering around Helios. But perhaps Jack had longer-term plans for Gortys? If he did, he hadn’t shared them with Rhys. 

Rhys tried not to think about it. 

**

The news that Handsome Jack was back spread through Helios like a wildfire, as did Jack’s sudden reorganization of the upper echelons of management, mostly via airlock. 

Yvette kept them updated with the latest news of it. Rhys wasn’t really sure he wanted to hear it, but what you didn’t know in Hyperion could kill you, and while right now Jack seemed content to forget all about Rhys, Rhys worried about the future. 

Maybe Jack would decide he felt resentful that he’d had to ride in the backseat of Rhys’s brain for so long. Maybe he’d decide Rhys hadn’t been deferential enough while they’d been on Pandora. Maybe Jack would just decide he didn’t like Rhys’s face. He’d airlocked people for less. 

But the news Yvette brought was...tentatively good. So far, the only people Jack had airlocked (or shot, or beheaded, or shot  _ and _ beheaded  _ and _ airlocked in one spectacular case) were people Rhys had always felt uneasy about having in charge of a megacorporation. Mind you, Rhys felt that way about Jack these days too, but there was nothing to be done about that. 

Not anymore. 

**

After a week, Jack promoted Rhys, Yvette, and Vaughn to positions on the Board. That would have been startling enough, but Jack came himself to tell them, having located them all at the bar they frequented. 

They were sitting in their favorite booth, the one in the corner with a view of the dance floor, when the CEO himself slid into the seat beside Rhys. The wave of whispering throughout the bar should have cued them in, but Vaughn had just gotten to the good part of a story about another accountant snorting Engorge while at work, so they hadn’t been paying attention. It was only once Rhys was already staring at the shiny-new clasps on Jack’s mask that he realized the bar had gone quiet. 

Vaughn cut off in the middle of a word, eyeballs bugging as he stared at the bigger man across the table from him. Jack wrapped a warm, heavy arm around Rhys’s shoulders. Rhys could smell his cologne and feel the warmth of his palm as it squeezed his shoulder. 

“So, chickadees, I’m about to do you all a big favor!” Jack grinned, eyes skipping between them before resting on Rhys’s face. Rhys felt sweat break out along his hairline. “As you may have heard, some spaces just opened up on the Board of Departmental Directors, and I’m gonna put each of you into three of those freshly-opened spaces! Nothing like rewarding good service done for the king, huh?”

“Uhh, which spaces would those be?” Vaughn managed, a little choked. “Aren’t there like...six now open?”

“Well, my pint-sized beef, I figured you’d take Accounting, but I guess you can have your pick.” Jack’s hand slid up Rhys’s shoulder, thumb coming to rest just inside the collar of Rhys’s shirt. The edge of the thumbnail pressed right atop Rhys’s artery. He swallowed hard. “If you decide you want a career change you could take leadership of R&D or something,” Jack laughed. 

Rhys stared at the table, unable to move his body. Was he scared? Was he turned on? All he could tell was that his heart was beating so, so fast and his palms were suddenly sweaty. 

Yvette spread one hand gracefully on the table and smiled at Jack. “Thank you, sir, that’s very generous of you. But I want Research and Development.”

“You do?” Rhys asked, echoed by Vaughn. “Why?”

Yvette smiled at Rhys, sort of, but mostly at Handsome Jack. “Because in Requisitions, all I get to do is approve requests allowing  _ other _ people to use all the cool things the science departments produce, years after other people have known all about them. I think it’d be fun to be informed as they happen, and to be in charge of testing parameters.”

“I like a girl who likes adventure,” Jack grinned. “Sold! The position is yours. And what about you, my pocket-sized panzer?”

Rhys managed to suppress a snort at the epithet. Vaughn actually blushed, hiding his hands under the table and leaning back against the pleather seat. 

“I, uh, wow I--I mean I’ll probably just stick with Accounting, right? I’m good with numbers and I know those guys.”

“Give it tonight and get back to me tomorrow then, hot stuff," Jack said generously. "You got pretty bloodthirsty down on the planet, maybe you’d like to take over weapons manufacturing!”

Vaughn looked stunned. Perhaps he, like Rhys, had been hoping that Jack in his new body had somehow forgotten everything that had happened on Pandora even despite all the work done to keep that from happening.

But then Jack turned to Rhys, shoving his nose into Rhys’s hair and inhaling. The sudden temperature change caused by the air being sucked through his coif made Rhys even more aware of the living, breathing body beside him. 

“And you, princess,” Jack purred, voice low and warm in Rhys’s ear. “How can I treat you right?”

Was Rhys going to throw up or pop a boner? Only time would tell, but both would be humiliating. Jack’s nose brushed against the rim of Rhys’s ear and a shiver of sensation ran through him, settling just above his tailbone. 

“I, uh. Whatever position you think is best would probably be great.”

At this, Jack pulled away, using his grip on Rhys’s collar to shake him, perhaps coincidentally pulling the fabric taut around Rhys’s throat so his head pounded. 

“C’mon, sweetcheeks, you can do better than that! Grow a pair, grab life by the balls, get what you want--that was too many ball references in one sentence, but whatever, whatever. I’ll give you two lovebirds till tomorrow to figure out what you want. Meanwhile, this lovely lady can start her new job by then because she’s decisive.” Shoving Rhys away so he had to catch himself with his shaky flesh arm, Jack leaned across the table to look at Yvette with a smile. “I think you’ll like the perks, my dear. Especially the pay raise. Treat yourself to something for me, would you?”

And then he got up and left. 

A few seconds later Yvette pulled her hands into her lap again and stared at the table, perhaps not realizing how it perfectly mirrored Vaughn. 

Rhys straightened up, tugging his collar and tie back to center, then ran a hand through his hair to tidy it. He thought he could somehow still feel Jack’s breath against his temple. 

“Am I dead?” Vaughn asked at last. “And if not, how soon before you think that’ll change? Is he trying to get us killed? Or do you actually think that offer’s genuine?”

Yvette scoffed. “Does Handsome Jack give out jobs when he’s trying to get someone killed? No. He just shoots them and then laughs at the corpse. And the corpse’s family.”

Rhys and Vaughn both nodded at the truth of this. 

**

Having slept on it, Rhys had calmed down. Why _wouldn’t_ Jack want to reward them? They’d gotten him back to Helios and alive again,  _ and _ brought a Vault key into his grasp! That merited some special treatment, surely. 

Yvette found a hefty starting bonus in her account, so she took her friends out to lunch. A delicious lunch no less, and Rhys enjoyed it all the more for knowing he was about to get a way bigger promotion than the one Vasquez had ruined. 

Vaughn eventually settled on Accounting, just because he was scared of what Jack would do if asked for something else. 

Rhys took Weapons Production, figuring he could call Sasha to hire her as his consultant. He didn’t know anything about weapons but she did. 

Jack had sent Fiona and Sasha back to Pandora, instructing them (in Rhys’s body, apparently, using Jack’s authorization codes) to wait there while Rhys got the Gortys beacon. The two con artists had apparently gone with extreme reluctance, certain that Rhys was either trying to screw them out of access to the Vault or get them in trouble with Vallory. 

Or rather, they _had_ been reluctant to leave until Jack had cashed out thirty thousand dollars to send down with them, and gotten them a direct trip to Hollow Point.

It was disturbing that Rhys didn’t remember doing any of this, and that neither Fiona nor Sasha seemed to know it hadn’t been him. But, well. It was done, and everybody was safe, so no harm no foul, right? Jack had kept his word and not harmed Rhys’s friends again. Hell, the promotions for Vaughn and Yvette were the opposite of harm. 

Rhys and Vaughn drafted and sent their emails to Jack that afternoon. Then they ordered take-out together for dinner.

Since Sasha still called Rhys every evening asking for updates on the Gortys beacon, and it was impossible to explain his capacity for making a job offer to Sasha without first explaining Rhys’s own promotion, Sasha quickly found out about Jack’s return. That revelation didn’t go over well. 

So Rhys tried to improve her mood by making the job offer.  She did not take the job offer well either. There was a lot of shouting from both her and Fiona, and yet more accusations of Gortys-theft. 

But in the end Sasha did take the job. (With a lot of conditions. Rhys wasn’t sure where on Pandora she was going to find a corporate lawyer, but he had confidence in her to do so, because she wanted a contract with about a zillion stipulations and emergency exit strategies planned into it. Which seemed fair, all things considered. He didn’t think it would  _ help, _ because this was Hyperion, but it was worth a try at least.)

**

Jack turned up at Rhys and Vaughn’s shared apartment that night, thankfully just after ending the call with Sasha. 

Jack didn't even knock. It occurred to Rhys later that he must have hacked the lock, because by the time Rhys had gotten up from the couch to figure out who was messing with the doorknob, there Jack was. 

Seeing Jack's big shape in the doorway, harsh fluorescent hallway lights shining off the clasps of his mask, felt like waking into a nightmare. Or possibly a wet dream? Rhys had a lot of dreams which started like this, especially since returning from Pandora, but which way those dreams went varied. 

Jack sauntered into the living room, hands on his hips, staring around the modest space with a look of disgust. 

“This is where you live, cupcake? Really? Yikes. Well we gotta fix that ASAP.”

Vaughn, who had gone to the bathroom to get away from the yelling, came back out to a serious surprise. His eyes bugged out, and he huddled back against the wall as if he'd retreat into his bedroom to hide, but Jack had already caught sight of him.

“This is all we can afford,” Rhys started to explain, until Jack smacked him hard in the chest and Rhys shut up with a sharp “OOF!” of distress. One fingertip had caught him right in the nipple, and he cupped his hand over it protectively. It throbbed.

“You’re living in the past, sugartits!” Jack swung his arms out wide. “This shithole is what you could afford  _ yesterday, _ before I graced you with my generosity. What do you think, you wanna move into one of the executive suites on the upper left arm of the station, or into one of the VIP living quarters right below mine? What am I even saying, you want the second option. We’ll be neighbors, won’t that be great? I already dropped by Yvette’s place, she’s got movers helping her out as we speak. Smart lady, I like her, why does she hang out with you dorks?”

Crossing to the couch, Jack picked up the pint of ice cream Rhys had been eating, looked at the flavor, surveyed the reality TV show on the monitor, and then looked back at Rhys. Jack’s eyes raked up and down Rhys’s body in the least erotic way possible. Jack lifted one very skeptical eyebrow and something in Rhys shriveled up in shame.

“Point is, this fuckin’ dorm suite of yours is cute and homoerotic and all, but I expect the leaders of my company to live to a higher standard. Let’s add some in-house cleaning and grooming services to the list of things you should get with your new salary, okay babe? Oh, and of course you and Vaughn will want to live separately from now on.”

A wave of nausea and shock went through Rhys. It felt exactly like that instant after one tripped, when the brain sent a flood of sensation and chemicals into the body as it attempted to catch itself before injury occurred. Except Rhys wasn’t falling and his legs couldn’t help him here. 

Rhys started to babble excuses for the state of the apartment b ut Handsome Jack was no longer paying attention. He marched down the hall instead. Vaughn made to back away, figuring Jack was trying to get to Rhys’s room, but when Jack drew level with Vaughn he instead wrapped Vaughn up in a tight embrace. Jack pulled him up to his much higher chest and swung him around. 

“Goddammit you are just  _ so cute! _ All those hot muscles jammed into one tiny body! It’s like if I asked R&D to design a boyfriend and they went with something compact for portability. I could put you in a suitcase and take you with me on trips, let you out for conversation and sex. Now there’s an idea!” He winked at Vaughn as he set him back down, but stayed holding his shoulders. Jack's knuckles whitened as he squeezed, and Rhys saw Vaughn’s eyes go wide as he stared up into Jack’s face. Jack had more than a foot of height on Vaughn. “We’d have to build some sort of oxygen delivery system into the case. I’d want you in peak condition upon arrival, of course. Man, I just can’t decide if I want you to have a big dick or a small one!”

Was this what dying felt like, Rhys wondered? Something hurt along his sternum and seethed in his gut. His right arm twitched.

Vaughn visibly flinched away when Jack ran a finger under his chin, but Jack didn’t seem to notice. Instead he turned aside, marching back over to the front door. 

For a moment Rhys thought it might be over, but then Jack snapped his fingers and caught himself with one hand on the door frame, leaning back into the apartment again. His mismatched eyes flicked between the other two men as he hung over the threshold. 

Digging into one of his pockets, Jack brought out two gleaming objects. Jack came in and grasped Vaughn’s unresisting hand first, pressing one object into it, and then went to Rhys to push the remaining object into Rhys’s chest. Rhys fumbled it but managed to catch it before it hit the ground. 

“Equip those and don’t take them off. Wear them to sleep and in the shower, if you can.” He winked at Vaughn. “And get a new place to live tomorrow after work! Then at eight pee-em, dinner with me, okay babes?”

With that Jack was gone. He didn’t even bother to shut the door behind him, so after several long, silent seconds, Vaughn went and pulled it closed until it clicked. 

Rhys slowly folded onto the floor, one limb at a time, until his face pressed to the carpet and shut out the rest of the world. After a few moments of silence, Vaughn sat down beside him. 

“Yeah,” Vaughn said simply. That about summed it up. 

It wasn’t till some time later that Rhys managed to look at what Jack had given him: a top-of-the-line shield. Rhys suspected knowing the price would give him a(nother) heart attack. 

He clipped it to his pyjama pants anyway. This was Hyperion, after all. Vasquez had proven that one could never be too careful, even when everything seemed fine. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments get me to write more, so. Maybe leave some comments!


	3. Sugar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still covering a lot of ground in terms of events happening that are background to the story. Whoops.

Work the next day involved meeting the leading staff of their departments, being given summaries of what work was currently in progress, and in Rhys’s case, touring the facilities. Rhys spent the whole time wishing Sasha were there, and wondering if it made him a bad person to contemplate asking her to work here full-time rather than just as a consultant. By the end of the day he’d decided to ask, because the worst she could do was call him sellout Hyperion scum again, and she’d already done that enough that it was losing its zing. 

(It wasn’t, really, because Rhys knew it was true. But he’d make sure she got paid lots. Surely she’d appreciate that? Everybody appreciated that.)

The fact that she’d agreed to even be a consultant was a huge win. Rhys congratulated himself again. 

Until he tried to arrange for a moving team to get his things, and discovered that Jack had already hired one and everything he owned was already in one of the VIP quarters. Except for most of the furniture, which, they informed Rhys, had been thrown away. New, better, less ugly items had been acquired instead. 

When Rhys arrived at his new home that evening, after getting lost three separate times on the way, he found his massive, lonely new living space very tastefully decorated and sparkling clean. Most notable of all, the Handsome Jack posters, which he had taken down from his bedroom walls once he’d returned from Pandora with the man himself in cranial tow, were still rolled up and in the closet. Or _ a _ closet, anyway; the new living space had eight, possibly more, and one of the closets that adjoined his bedroom was larger than the college dorm he’d shared with Vaughn. So the posters took a while to find. 

This place had so much space, including three spare bedrooms and a lot of rooms that could be repurposed as bedrooms. Which meant he and Vaughn could easily continue living together, right? Would it be gauche to ask this soon? Would it be gauche to ask at all? Maybe Vaughn wanted his own space. 

Nothing ventured nothing gained, Rhys supposed, so he called Vaughn. Vaughn didn’t pick up, which set a prickle of anxiety running up Rhys’s spine. So Rhys used his ECHO-eye to look up Vaughn’s new address, which turned out to be in this same block of residences, but directly below Handsome Jack’s abode rather than several floors down. 

When Rhys arrived, a retina scan let him in the front door, just as it had with Rhys’s own place. Rhys saw Vaughn’s shoes just inside the door, which seemed encouraging, but when Rhys announced himself no one responded. 

The massive living room was eerily silent, and much more lushly decorated than Rhys’s own. The couches were leather so soft it felt like babyskin--and given that Handsome Jack had requested all this, Rhys couldn’t be a hundred percent certain they weren’t. 

Rhys left his own shoes by the door and padded further in on near-silent socked feet. Checking the entertainment room (massive, even bigger than the one in Rhys’s place) yielded nothing, nor did the en suite gym. That warmed Rhys’s heart to see even despite the overwhelming discomfort of all this, because it was a kind of sensitivity and attentiveness Rhys had not expected of Handsome Jack, and Vaughn deserved nice things. 

Rhys blinked at the treadmill. Then the fact that Handsome Jack was being sensitive and attentive to Vaughn, after making weirdly sexual remarks about him last night, sank in and Rhys’s skin went cold. He found he had to sit down on the padded floor, knees suddenly shaky. 

Jack had been, at times, what seemed like flirtatious with Rhys himself. Rhys knew from extensive research (before his time on Pandora, back when his crush had been at a comfortably distant remove from the real thing, and then when the real thing had been dead) that there were only two men ever who had been brave enough (or stupid enough) to publicly claim that Handsome Jack had slept with them. That, combined with the massive ranks of women who _ were _ publicly known to have slept with Jack, plus Jack’s actual long-term girlfriend who had died around the same time as he had, had made Rhys believe Jack was straight. 

But now, with the events of the last few days taken into account...maybe those two men hadn’t been lying. Maybe there had in fact been more like them that the tabloids hadn’t found. Maybe now that Jack had a human body again, he had his eye on a certain man. 

That it might not be Rhys himself, and might instead be Vaughn, was a nightmare. (Not least because Rhys was a little jealous. Only a little; he knew now that his crush on the Hyperion CEO had been best served by distance and the impossibility of being reciprocated.) The worst part was that Vaughn had no interest in Jack whatsoever, disdainful at best and terrified at worst. What if Jack abused his power? What if he _ hurt _ Vaughn?

But it was also a problem because--

Because...

Because on Pandora Rhys had realized he was in love with Vaughn and too chickenshit to do anything about it. 

He’d been promising himself the whole time they’d been back on Helios that he’d say something to Vaughn. Yet, he still hadn’t done it. He _imagined_ doing it many times a day, but actually finding the right words and saying them seemed impossible. How was anyone supposed to confess love to the bro who'd seen them at their absolute worst? Maybe it was a hopeless endeavor.

He’d had thoughts about Vaughn here and there for years, all the way back from their first semester of college. But seeing the way Vaughn had cooked up the plan to go down to Pandora in the first place, embezzled a cool $10 million without blinking, survived a bandit attack, and then proceeded to become a total badass who’d attacked a crime boss just to help his friends...

What if Vaughn got over his hatred of Jack and decided he liked Jack better than Rhys?

When Rhys finally let himself think it, he shook his head with a laugh, rubbing a hand over his face. As a nameless, wordless fear of being passed over and abandoned it was scary, but Rhys couldn’t _ actually _ imagine Vaughn going for Handsome Jack. Yeah, Vaughn preferred big guys, but that was just a preference, while Vaughn _ required _ that his partners not be assholes. 

...Hopefully Rhys didn’t qualify as an asshole?

Rhys got to his feet. He told himself, again, that he’d confess to Vaughn soon. 

Emotional moment now officially over, Rhys resumed his search for the man himself. 

Several more empty rooms passed. When Rhys heard voices and recognized one of them as Jack, Rhys realized he might actually be on a rescue mission. He trotted down a long hallway, slowing and quieting his footsteps as he neared what he assumed was the master bedroom. 

“C’mon, baby, just give it a try.”

Rhys tensed up, preparing himself to go in and defend Vaughn’s virtue, when Vaughn snorted in disgust. 

“No, send them back where you got them. I look horrible in yellow.”

“You’re being awfully ungrateful," Jack growled. "I did just buy you a gorgeous new wardrobe of clothes.”

Hearing that grumpy tone, Rhys leaned forward again, but--

“For which I am grateful, thank you. But I don’t want the yellow ones, and I’m not wearing them tonight. Or ever.”

Jack let out a put-upon groan at that. “You’re killing me here. I’m investing in you three, and you of all people oughtta know about investments. I wanna see you all killing it in your new jobs, okay? And yellow is the company color.”

“And yet, I am still a person, not a mascot. I don’t have to match the logo to represent this company well, or be competent in my job.”

Where was all this backbone coming from? Vaughn had been just as scared as Rhys last night when Jack showed up unannounced to their place and jimmied their lock. But Rhys couldn’t deny, listening to Vaughn stand up for himself to the CEO was...pretty hot. 

“Fine. I gotta admit it’s...kinda weirdly hot how much balls you’ve got, standing up to me like this. What colors _ do _ you like to wear?” 

Vaughn responded but Rhys didn’t hear it. Instead he blinked, then blinked again, a weird sensation sweeping over him at the similarity between his thoughts and Jack’s words. The hairs rose on the back of his neck and his flesh arm, like a sixth sense of _ something, _ though he couldn’t have said what. 

“All right, hot stuff, have it your way,” Jack continued, and there was a thump, as if someone had sat heavily upon something. “But you have to appreciate the pants, since none of those are yellow. Your pants right now, and frankly every pair I’ve seen you in, are a travesty. They make you look like you have no ass, and are somehow both tight and saggy. So how about you try on that really nice pair over there?” Rhys privately agreed with Jack, and relaxed because this seemed like it was going well. But then-- “C’mon, baby, I’ve been a good sugar daddy today, I deserve something in return, right?”

Rhys straightened up, meaning to walk in now, but Vaughn beat him to the punch again. 

“If you wanna throw so-called sugar at me, that’s your prerogative, but I’m still not getting naked for you.”

Well, that was blunt, and Rhys really didn’t want to hear how much weirder Jack was going to make this if he was upset about being turned down. Rhys let his feet fall heavy the last few yards to the door. 

“I heard voices down the hall so I came looking! Hope you don’t mind that I let myself in! Apparently your front door is programmed to admit my retinas.” Rhys pretended to be surprised by the sight of the open closet with all-new clothes in it. “Whoa, sweet duds.” He turned a grin on Jack, who sat sprawled in one of the gorgeous armchairs around the edge of the room.

To some people Jack might have looked relaxed, but Rhys could see his knuckles were white, and his smile at seeing Rhys had an edge to it. 

Weirder still, Jack wore a very handsome (heh) suit. Jack normally refused to dress up for any reason. He wore what he liked whenever he liked--prerogative of the CEO, he’d always said. So seeing him in a suit was strange. 

It also made Rhys’s heart beat faster. It was a _ very _ good look. The tailored black fabric accentuated the width of the man’s shoulders, the dip of his waist, the size of his hands. The collared shirt was Hyperion yellow. 

Having just heard Vaughn stand up to Jack, some stupid part of Rhys decided to push his luck. 

“No love for your meat-buddy, huh? I see I only got part of the royal treatment. No new clothes in _ my _ closet.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Your clothes actually _ fit _ you, at least. So while you do still need a fashion intervention--I dunno if you noticed, but I had my guys throw away some of the worst items, you’re welcome by the way--I didn’t need to start from scratch.”

Rhys gulped at that. So, yeah, he had to admit that nobody else seemed to like his tuckable skinny ties. But the rest of his wardrobe was pretty good, right? 

“Which items?” he choked out. 

Handsome Jack just grinned, waggling his eyebrows at Rhys. 

“Any I didn’t like, pumpkin. How about you go back and change for dinner, find out what’s missing from your sense of taste?”

Rhys glanced over at Vaughn, whose eyes begged him not to leave. 

“I dunno, I wanna see my buddy here do a fashion show for us, since apparently you’ve spiffed him up. Whaddaya say, bro?”

The ‘bro’ just popped out, reflexive. Rhys suppressed a wince. _ Way to set the scene for confessing romantic passion, _ he thought, _ by using language that labels you as siblings. Ugh. _

The way Jack smiled and settled his chin into one hand only reinforced that it had been an error. Maybe Rhys was reading too much into it, and maybe Jack was simply pleased with the prospect of Vaughn showing off the clothes Jack had bought. But Jack looked like a man who had just realized the competition was no competition at all. 

Vaughn disappeared into the walk-in closet, shutting the door behind him to preserve his modesty, which Jack complained about again. 

“Oh c’mon, sugarlumps, I’ve already seen you with your tits out!” Jack called, but the closet door stayed closed. 

Trying to lighten the mood, Rhys asked Jack about his day. That incited Jack to start complaining. It occupied the time until Vaughn emerged--and at the sight of him Rhys’s mouth immediately filled with saliva, the skin of his chest and neck heating as his palms grew damp. 

Well, whatever else one might say about Hyperion's CEO, Jack had been right about Vaughn needing a new wardrobe. 

The shirt Vaughn wore, a beautiful honey-gold, brought out both blond streaks in Vaughn’s hair and the soft natural blue of his eyes, so different from Rhys’s own neon blue ECHOeye. The shirt also somehow managed to accentuate Vaughn’s biceps, and led the eye down to his tiny waist and the flawlessly-fitted pants below. Navy with a faint pinstripe, they further brought out Vaughn’s eyes and showed off his package to a disturbing degree, as well as straining over his muscular thighs in a way that had to be intentional.

Jack must’ve scanned Vaughn from head to toe and given the 3D model to the tailors to get these kinds of results, Rhys realized. ‘Like if I asked R&D to design a boyfriend and they went with something compact for portability’ indeed.

Jack grinned, jerking his chin up in acknowledgement. 

“Nice. _ That’s _ what daddy likes to see.”

Vaughn rolled his eyes at that, but one corner of his mouth also curled up as he smoothed the front of his shirt. 

“I dunno if the pants really fit me--”

“They do,” both Rhys and Jack interrupted, and Jack smacked Rhys’s arm for it. Rhys jumped, grabbing at the stinging stripe left behind. 

“Hey,” he protested softly. 

“Company property, I treat it how I like,” Jack replied, sounding almost bored. 

“I didn’t haul your digital ass all the way across a hostile planet just to be insulted,” Rhys pushed his luck again. 

Rather than punish him by hitting him worse this time, as Jack undoubtedly would have when he had been an AI, Jack just rolled his eyes and let out a gusty long-suffering sigh as though he were the put-upon one. 

Another tingle of...something….went through Rhys then. It felt a little like déja vu except with no sense of visual familiarity. Like something looming over him. 

Vaughn, meanwhile, turned to look at himself in the huge mirror along one wall. (Positioned to provide an excellent view of the equally huge bed, Rhys realized with an uncomfortable sinking feeling.) But Rhys forgot all about the weird non-déja-vu when Vaughn caught his eyes and smiled at him in the mirror. 

“All right then, if you two insist that business pants are supposed to fit like leggings, I’ll take your word. Let’s go pick up Yvette for dinner.”

**

Dinner that night was...difficult. The restaurant itself was upscale without being alienating, down closer to the Hub of Heroism than to their new luxury apartments were. The menu didn’t list prices and Jack just ordered for all of them as though that were normal. Thankfully none of them were vegetarian (anymore, Vaughn had been in college) or it would have been a problem. As it was, people kept staring at them, eyes flicking between Jack and the other three as if memorizing faces. 

Jack sat himself pointedly between Rhys and Vaughn, and then asked Vaughn a bunch of personal questions. Yvette saved them all by pretending Jack had meant the questions as ice-breakers for all of them, answering them herself first, and then prompting all three men to do the same, including Jack himself. 

Once she had started them off, once the three of them fell into more of their usual banter and familiarity, Jack seemed to relax. Rhys couldn’t have said why he thought that, because he wouldn’t have said Jack had started the meal tense. But yet, by the end of it, something told Rhys that Jack was calmer. Happier. Maybe something about the tone of his voice, or the way he phrased his rejoinders. 

They heard nothing from him for the next few days, even when Yvette contacted him to ask him to dinner again. Rhys figured (hoped?) that maybe Jack had gotten something out of his system and he’d leave them alone now. 

Because even without Jack, Rhys had other concerns, like learning how to run a whole new department when he knew nothing about guns, and trying to figure out how to broach the subject of Feelings with Vaughn. Rhys agonized over phrasing and timing and went through endless rehearsals and self-recrimination in the shower. Every morning he told himself he’d go over to Vaughn’s house that evening and tell him, and every night by bedtime he still hadn’t done it. Instead Rhys occupied himself with re-populating his wardrobe, making extensive use of the tailor whose ECHO number he found programmed into his tech, doubtless thanks to Jack.

During those days, actual publicity announcements went out on the ECHOnet about Jack’s resurrection. The announcements claimed that this had been Jack’s plan all along: that in case of his death, he would wait a length of time for any potential fighting to die down, and then be resurrected by the science team. No mention of Rhys, an AI, or the tech used to bring him back was made at all. 

Which was fine. It was all fine. Jack had already promoted them, he hadn't hurt Sasha or Fiona, and even Gortys was safe, so everybody had gotten what they wanted, right? 

If only Rhys could figure out what to say to Vaughn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments promote the health and wellbeing of multi-chapter fics. Support your local fic today!


	4. Shields

When everything inevitably went wrong again, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. 

Rhys should have anticipated that there would be violence. Jack had anticipated it, hence giving all three of them shields that, when Rhys had made the error of looking up the cost of the model on the ECHOnet, had given Rhys heart palpitations. Because the fact was, Rhys had pissed off a lot of people on Pandora, Helios, and a multitude of other planets and stations, first with the botched Vault key deal, then by running afoul of a major gang boss, and then by bringing Jack back from the dead.

But even so, the attack still came as a surprise. And Rhys especially hadn’t anticipated that someone would try to get all _ three _ of them: Rhys, Vaughn, and Yvette. 

Rhys really should have remembered that Vallory wasn’t dead yet. Having taken care of Finch and Kroger immediately, Rhys had just assumed Jack had quietly ordered hits on the others. But Rhys really _ also _ should have remembered that quiet wasn’t Jack’s style, and that if Vallory had been dead, Jack would have been bragging about killing more bandits. 

Which meant that when Rhys stood beside his friends in the shuttle bay, waiting for Sasha to arrive, he nearly pissed himself when the gunshots started. He had always wondered how it felt and sounded to be wearing a shield as it deflected bullets, and now he knew. It was kind of a dull ‘thip’ sound. One after another in quick succession.

It was nonetheless loud and close enough to be terrifying. Something in Rhys’s hindbrain supplied that there were six shots, clustered together fast enough to be some sort of machine gun. 

Vaughn pulled them all to the ground. Rhys slammed his knee and wrist on the way down, painless in the adrenaline. A hud flashed up in his ECHOeye, letting him know the shots had barely even touched his shield’s capacity and it was recharging already. But as another burst of fire hit the ground right where his hand was, Rhys still shuffled behind crates for cover. Sure, the shield had kept his flesh hand safe again, but Rhys still very much disliked bullets that close to any part of him. 

He was dialing Jack before he could think it through. It rang several times--a hail of bullets hit the crates, causing intense splintering and groaning sounds, and Yvette’s shoulder pressed into his--before Jack picked up. 

“Look, pumpkin, I know you want to see me again, but you’ve got to accept that Daddy is--”

“We’re being shot at!” Rhys gasped. Shouting came from somewhere nearby, and he scanned the room with his eye. Most of the people were Hyperion employees, names flashing up from the company registry, but that didn’t mean anything--Vasquez was simply the most recent example of the fact that Hyperion employees would happily commit murder. There were no laws in space, after all. But then Rhys’s eye threw up a red flag, outlining a pair of people who, it informed him, were Pandoran in origin.

The shields would protect someone from bullets, Rhys realized, but it wouldn’t keep them safe from being kidnapped.

Down the line Jack swore, creatively and graphically, and then hung up. 

The turrets came up right after that, and then there was more shouting, more hails of bullets, and the three of them cowered even further down toward the ground. Yvette started crying, little shuddering heaves of her shoulder against Rhys. He wrapped his metal arm around her, tugging her down against his chest. A distant part of his brain realized that this actually put her in between him and the bullets, but there was only so much he could do while on the floor during active fire. 

Which was when Vallory herself showed up. She stepped out of a small ship, immediately identifiable against the sea of suits and security armor as people ran every which way. She shouldered her rocket launcher, aimed it their way--

And Jack body-checked her, appearing out of thin air. The rocket launcher went flying and she fell with Jack on top of her, his gun already drawn. 

But then Jack appeared by Rhys’s side. Rhys flinched, because a big body suddenly manifesting a few feet away from him would have been shocking at the best of times. Add to that the fact that he could literally see Jack _ right over there _ as well--

The Jack at Rhys’s side settled a sniper rifle against his shoulder, aimed--

August, who’d come out of the ship after Vallory, went down as Jack’s explosive shot took out his shields in one go. 

“Stay here,” Jack commanded, and then vanished again. 

Rhys had no idea how long the firefight lasted, just that bullets thunked into their shields again and again until suddenly everything went quiet. From somewhere above, Rhys heard the station-wide PA cheerfully state, “All hostiles pacified! Medical teams dispatched to Docking Bay Five.”

Jack appeared at their side again. His eyes scanned them. 

“Did any of that even deplete your shields?”

Rhys shook his head, though he glanced down at Yvette, clinging to his belly, and further to his left where Vaughn sat curled into an absurdly small lump. He couldn’t see any blood on either of them.

“They’re very good shields,” Rhys said. “Thank you, by the way.”

But Jack looked away. “Uh, about that. I’m--only sort of Jack. It’s, um. Good to meet you, though?”

Rhys blinked, and then suddenly remembered the body double program. Activating his ECHOeye, he searched the hangar until his eye registered another nearby figure as Jack. 

The man was hunched over on his knees, one hand to his mouth and shoulders curled down. 

“Something’s wrong with Jack,” Rhys realized, saying it aloud as he thought it. “Or, well, that other Jack. Is that the real one?” The body double nodded, looking concerned as well. “I’m sorry Yvette, can I--”

She uncurled her fingers from the folds of his shirt, and Vaughn held her instead. She buried her face in the collar of his shirt. 

“Is this what it was like on Pandora?” she asked in a very small voice as Rhys rose and walked away. 

“All the time,” Vaughn replied. 

Rhys glanced around as he approached Jack. He’d been so fixated on finding him that he hadn’t really looked at everything else. Jack was just a few feet away now, and near him was--

Vallory. Or, what used to be Vallory. Given the large holes in her, and the...splatters around those, what was on the ground was very much not Vallory anymore. 

Rhys made himself look away but it was too late. He’d already seen it. A wave of nausea took him over but he made himself keep walking, because Jack was--

“You okay?” Rhys croaked, pressing a hand over his mouth. When he looked down, Jack was doing the same. 

Which was strange, when Rhys thought of it. Jack waved him away with one hand, but he didn’t get up, and a second later he made a little retching noise.

Which only set Rhys off worse, but...something was wrong here. Maybe this wasn’t Jack either? Maybe this was another body double, and the first one had been mistaken. 

“Uhhm,” Rhys started, and then had to swallow hard because he couldn’t stop thinking about Vallory nearby. “Look, I dunno how to, uh, ask this. But are you the real Jack? I apparently just met one who wasn’t.”

Possibly-Jack retched again. “I’d be offended you couldn’t tell me from a fake if I hadn’t worked so hard to make sure that fake is indistinguishable from me. He even has my--” There was a silence as Jack swallowed hard, then breathed through his nose. “Even has my fingerprints.”

Rhys gave him a skeptical look at this, not because of the fingerprints thing, but because _ Jack’s voice shook. _ Why in the hell would _ Handsome Jack’s _ voice be shaking after a relatively straightforward firefight in which only the bad guys had died? (Hopefully. Rhys really hoped only bad guys had died.) Jack loved killing people, the messier the better!

But Jack flailed one arm back at Rhys, managing to catch him in the knee. 

“Help me up, cupcake. If I vomit, though, tell everyone it was my double.”

Rhys still wasn’t certain this was the real Jack, but he offered his hands. 

He almost fell over when Jack pulled on them. Jack laughed. 

“I forget what a floppy beanpole you are, fuck. But okay. Okay, I’m up, and my knees almost aren’t shaking now, so I win. Are Yvette and Vaughn okay?”

Rhys jerked his head over to where they now stood, the ostensible body double hovering at their side. Rhys waved at them, and Vaughn waved back. Yvette clung to Vaughn's shoulder. 

“Seems like,” Rhys replied, wishing he were over there with them, and not here with someone who was maybe Handsome Jack or maybe a stranger with a weak stomach. Everyone knew about Jack’s body doubles, but Rhys hadn’t realized they could be so convincing at close range. If the doubles were this good, how was he ever supposed to know if he was interacting with the real Jack?

Jack started walking over to the others, then paused and leaned over, breathing heavily. A few moments later he straightened back up again, but the set of his mouth spoke of unhappiness. And probably nausea. 

Jack nodded at the double as they got closer. “How many did you snipe off, babycake?”

“Six. They came with several ships full of men. How did this many get past security? It was like the Lost Legion all over again in here.”

Rhys glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t want to look that way, Vallory’s remains were very much still...all over there. But August had gone down nearby, and Rhys had thought the double had just clipped him in the shoulder with the incendiary round. 

“One of the people Jack airlocked last week was the head of security," Rhys thought aloud. Then he offered, "If that guy over there is still alive, he might be able to tell us how they got in. He’s the boss-lady’s son.”

The supposed body double flagged down armed guards and went to collect August. When this resulted in handcuffs and a medical team rather than a body bag, Rhys figured August hadn’t kicked the bucket yet. Good for him, Rhys thought. 

Then Rhys realized that August being alive in this context probably meant him getting interrogated by Handsome Jack, so Rhys tried to stop thinking about it immediately. 

Jack, meanwhile, was checking Vaughn over for injuries in what was obviously way too hands-on a fashion, especially given that there were medical teams nearby and Vaughn clearly wasn’t bleeding anywhere. Yvette’s presence and continued grip on Vaughn was probably all that kept Jack from demanding that Vaughn strip down on the spot. 

Rhys made a decision, because he hated watching the angry look on Vaughn’s face as he fended off Jack’s attentions. “Look, I dunno about everybody else here," Rhys began, trying to draw attention to himself, "but I just got given a sweet new place to live that has an amazing bath tub and a full bar. So I’m gonna call Sasha, figure out where she is, and then I vote we all go home, get drunk, and soak in hot water.” 

Yvette agreed, turning away immediately to go do that. She dragged Vaughn with her, so Rhys considered them taken care of. 

Which left Jack. Jack, whom Sasha absolutely would not want to see. 

“Sooo,” Rhys began, trying to figure out how to phrase this. “I actually came here for Sasha, who is maybe not your biggest fan in the world. She’s probably here in one of these ships.”

Jack looked even more nonplussed at this news. “Ugh, you brought her _back_ onto my space station? Kiddo, those shysters wore out their utility as soon as you got back here. I got rid of them for a reason.”

Rhys scowled. “Believe it or not, you just appointed me as head of the weapons division, and Sasha _ really _ knows her guns. So I brought her back as a consultant. She is here to make your company more profitable and your guns more deadly, okay?”

Jack glared at him, then glanced over to where Yvette and Vaughn were waiting with a bunch of other employees near the elevators. Jack gave an aggrieved sigh. 

“Fine, I can tell when I’m not wanted. But I had better receive an appropriate thank-you gesture for all this, because I stopped doing very important things to come down here and save your asses, and those shields I got you weren't cheap.”

Emboldened by how reasonable Jack was being, Rhys reached out and squeezed his shoulder. Jack gave him a cutting look and Rhys immediately dropped his hand.

“Yeah, yeah you did save our lives,” Rhys acknowledged. “I cannot even express how very glad I am not to be dead right now. Seriously. Which means you saved the day, became the hero again, and now you can go relax, right?”

Jack stalked off without another word. Probably to insinuate himself with Yvette and Vaughn again, but whatever. 

Rhys called Sasha. It turned out she was indeed in one of the ships--tied up, in the shuttle August and Vallory had arrived in.

Once Rhys found and released her from where she’d been strapped to one of the seats, he brought her over to the elevators. Jack was already gone, thankfully.

“August is still mad at me for the Vault key job," Sasha sighed. "And I've been trapped in Vallory's containment cells with Fiona for days, and strapped to that seat for a couple hours, so I’m smelly and sore and tired and I just want a wash and a bed.”

“I can give you both those things and more!” Rhys proclaimed, delighted by the fact that it was true. 

An hour later, they’d both washed and eaten and were on their way to drunk together. Vaughn texted to say that he was staying overnight with Yvette, since she was very shaken up by the whole experience. Rhys figured that with Vaughn, Loaderbot, and Gortys at her side, Yvette would be okay without him. He had Sasha here, and he was so glad to see her relatively unharmed that he didn’t want to make her go anywhere else. 

“What happened to Athena anyway?” Rhys asked, only slurring a little. Sasha was wearing a clean pair of his sweats and one of his T-shirts. He tried not to think about how nice she looked in them, all soft and familiar in a way he’d never seen her before. Like a real friend. 

“Apparently some other Vault Hunters, the ones who killed Handsome Jack, just wanted to talk to her. So they talked to her, and then released her, and she went back to Janey. Now they’re gonna get married in another couple months!” Sasha grinned, looking wistful. “If they invited you, would you come to the wedding? You may be corporate scum, and I still don’t trust you, but you’re rich enough to give them a really, really nice present. Or lots of presents.”

Rhys grinned. Coming from Sasha, this was almost a compliment. It suggested she didn’t immediately want to kill him to keep him away from people she genuinely cared about. 

“Of course I’d go. Everybody loves a wedding! Free food, weeping relatives--”

“Don’t think either of them has much in the way of relatives. What they do have is a lot of friends who hate Hyperion. So you’d better bring a really, _ really _ expensive present, Mister Tiny Business Cards.”

“Well soon enough you’re gonna have to print your own, Miss Corporate Sell-Out. You’re our newest consultant, remember?”

He realized as soon as he said it that he shouldn’t poke this particular sore spot between them, but he was drunk. And he didn’t like being made fun of by beautiful women. At least, not in this context.

Sasha gave a dramatic groan, throwing herself backwards onto the luxurious couch and almost spilling the remainder of her drink everywhere. 

“Come on, Rhys, pretend you don’t have brain damage, just for a minute! I wouldn’t have said yes to the job offer if I wasn’t being coerced by Vallory. You realize that, right?”

Rhys blinked at her. No, he had not realized. 

“But...but I don’t know anything about guns,” he said after a brief pause. “Please don’t leave me alone with the weapons division! They’re kind of terrifying. Some of those people seem like they _sleep_ with their guns, and I don’t just mean strapped into a thigh holster.”

Narrowing her eyes, Sasha stared at him.

“Pretty please?” Rhys repeated, because he was desperate enough to be beyond shame. Just like he had been while Vasquez was telling him to dig his own grave. At least Jack wasn’t here to see it this time. 

“I want a gun named after me,” Sasha said slowly. “And I wanna have complete design control over it. I want the testing team to be Hyperion workers, so if shit goes wrong with the prototypes, they’re the ones injured, not people down on Pandora.” 

Rhys blinked at her, confused, and her eyes narrowed into angry slits. 

“I bet you don’t even know about that, do you? When Hyperion wants to test new weapons to see how fast they break, or if they shock their users or explode when reloaded, they send down the prototypes to be sold cheap on Pandora, usually to bandits. The prototypes are loaded up with data chips to send information back to Helios about how they’re used. Sometimes that means a lot of bandits die really fast because there’s some catastrophic design flaw that kills users. Sometimes it means a lot of innocent people on Pandora die because there’s suddenly a bunch of heavily-armed bandits who can then sweep through whole towns to pillage and loot and kill anyone they don’t like. Sometimes it just means Hyperion makes money selling guns to scared people who want to protect their loved ones. But that’s the _ best _ possible outcome, and it’s still money that leaves Pandora and goes straight up to Hyperion, leaving the planet poorer than before.”

“Oh,” Rhys said simply. Then he teared up, because that was very sad, and he’d always been a maudlin drunk. _ Oh no, _ he thought distantly. _ I don’t wanna cry in front of Sasha. She will think I’m a complete idiot. Then I will be not only a terrible person but an idiot in front of an attractive woman, and that’s even worse than just being terrible. _ “I don’t want that to happen," Rhys said, with deep feeling. "How do we make that not happen?”

Sasha looked at him for a long time, then sat up, clinking her glass of expensive liquor against his. 

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever asked me. I dunno yet, but I bet we can find out.”

**

When Sasha was asleep in one of Rhys’s guest rooms, (the idea that he had multiple guest rooms was still very, very strange) Rhys took himself to the kitchen for a snack. He was very drunk, but just coherent enough to know that if he went to bed without eating something and drinking water, he’d be full of regret tomorrow. 

He was staring into his fridge when the front door opened and there was Jack. Again.

“Cupcake, you’re just who I want to see. Can you believe what a little shit Vaughn is? He kicked me out!”

_ I’m surprised you allowed him to do it, _ Rhys thought to himself, and thankfully didn’t say aloud. Instead he got out milk and cereal, pouring himself a bowl. 

Jack of course wanted his own bowl, and once he had it, he followed Rhys into the living room. Rhys sat down with a glass of water as Jack ate. 

“So, to what do I owe the pleasure?” Rhys asked. 

Jack stared at him for several seconds, an angry look on his face. Long enough for Rhys to grow frightened that he was gonna wind up with those huge hands around his throat. Finally, Jack just snorted and looked away. 

“I got you this place, I can come in whenever I want. So if I wanna see my favorite brain-buddy, whose life I just saved and who is being an ungrateful bastard about it, I will.”

Rhys at last developed the common sense to nod. “Mi casa is su casa. Sorta literally, as you point out. I think you own the whole space station anyway?”

Jack didn’t respond, instead busying himself with his cereal. 

Rhys tried to make conversation at first, but gave up when the attempts met with aggressive silent treatment. Had he done something wrong? Offended Jack in some way? But if so, why was the man _here, _ and Rhys unchoked?

Once Jack had eaten what he wanted, he set his bowl down on the coffee table and marched away down the hall. Rhys thought maybe he needed a bathroom, so he let the man go without question. He gathered up the dishes instead, putting them into the dishwasher, and then went down the hall to the master bedroom, feet dragging a little heavier with every step he took. 

Distantly, Rhys realized he had been slowing down all evening. The after-effects of adrenaline, plus the alcohol and the late hour at the end of a taxing work week meant that by the time Rhys reached his own oversized bedroom, his limbs felt as though they each had their own specialized and very intense gravity. His lashes were made of lead, dragging his eyes shut. There was nothing in the world that sounded as good as his own bed at that moment. 

Which made it very disturbing when Rhys’s fuzzy, unfocused eyes strayed over said bed and found Jack already in it, smack in the middle, clearly shirtless. 

Rhys’s brain would have struggled with this at the best of times, he thought, but _ now, _ already half asleep, it had no chance at coping. He’d had so many wet dreams and fantasies that started this way that actually seeing it in real life didn’t compute. 

On top of that, he was in love with _ Vaughn, _ and terrified of Jack in a way Rhys hadn’t been before this month.

“Is this a sex thing?” Rhys blurted. “Are we having sex?”

“Pumpkin, if we were fucking, you’d know, believe me,” Jack said in the most scathing possible tone. Rhys winced. “Now shut the hell up and come to bed.”

Rhys considered asking more questions. If this was not a sex thing, why was Jack even here? What other purpose was there for him to be mostly (or completely?) naked in Rhys’s bed?

But Rhys was tired, and Jack had said it wasn’t a sex thing. If that turned out to be a lie, well, Rhys would fuck that bridge when he came on it, he supposed. Or something. It was difficult to think. 

So he took his clothes off, tossed them on a nearby chair, unhooked his arm and set it in its cleaning dock, left his underwear on, and crawled under the covers. He tried to stay on his own side--easier than the alternative, in a bed as massive as this one--but Jack moved right over to where Rhys was. Rhys again grew certain this was leading to sex, and felt preemptively embarrassed since there was no way he could get or sustain an erection right now. But Jack just pulled at Rhys until Rhys had no choice but to turn onto his right side and spoon up along Jack’s long spine. 

For about a minute Rhys tried to bear this. Jack was warm and soft under Rhys’s left arm, his chest hair a pleasant texture on Rhys’s palm, and he thankfully seemed to have underwear on. But the pain of lying on the metal arm socket without extra cushioning quickly became unbearable. 

“Just--just gimme a second here, sorry,” Rhys apologized, and Jack growled. But when Rhys started piling up pillows for his shoulder and head, Jack turned to look, his expression fading from angry to puzzled. 

It took long, agonizing seconds for Rhys to shuffle and squish and organize the pillows just so. He never slept directly on his right side like this. Every other position, yes, to take the weight off the metal socket. But if Jack wanted to be spooned in this position, then that was what would happen. 

When Rhys was finally situated, Jack sighed, wriggling himself into place along Rhys’s belly. It was a little awkward around all the pillows, but Jack seemed determined not to be defeated by mere stuffing and fabric.

“I thought it’d be _more_ convenient, cuddling with a guy who doesn’t have a second arm to get in the way in this position. Apparently not,” Jack grumbled. 

But no more vitriol came after, just the soft sound of their breathing. Jack’s nose whistled just a little on the exhale, and Rhys wondered if that was the result of whatever injury necessitated the mask. Which Jack apparently wasn’t gonna take off even to sleep. 

But then Rhys himself was sleeping, so he didn’t think any more about it. 

**

He didn’t sleep well, of course. Rhys was used to having someone else in his apartment, not in his bed. Every time either of them moved--and Jack moved a lot at night, go figure--Rhys woke up. Anytime Jack woke up, he pulled Rhys into whatever position suited him, which woke Rhys up again during the rare instances in which he had managed to get back to sleep. Jack himself, meanwhile, seemed to have no trouble sleeping, and when he did, if he was on his back, he snored. 

By the time the alarm clock on the bedside table told Rhys it was 6AM, he’d gotten maybe a few choppy hours of shallow rest. 

If there were any experience designed to make Jack _ less _ appealing as a sexual object...well. To be honest, that really _ should _ have been their time on Pandora, with all the death threats, the physical brutality, and the constant negging. Plus, almost getting Rhys and everyone he cared about killed multiple times. Rhys’s boner was nothing if not a contrary bitch, however, so that hadn’t stopped him from jerking off to thoughts of Jack after getting the man himself literally out of his head. But _this,_ ugh. Proximity to Jack's body had never seemed so unappealing before. All Rhys wanted was sleep.

Rhys miserably wormed himself out of the bed and went to shower, hoping the hot water would soak the bruising and tension out of his bones. 

It didn’t help nearly as much as he wished. Coffee afterward did, though. Then leftovers from last night, because Rhys might suddenly be making way more money but he wasn’t too proud for leftovers.

Afraid of what Jack would do if he found Rhys out of bed without a good excuse, Rhys used his ECHOeye to call up all the notes on the various current and past gun models created by Hyperion. He started reading.

He fell asleep so fast that it wasn’t until Jack sat heavily on the couch next to him, thus waking him yet again sometime later, that Rhys even realized he’d been dreaming.

Lifting his head out of the drool puddle he’d made on the expensive fabric, Rhys eloquently said, “Hsshg?”

“I knew you were a loser who rarely got laid, but I didn’t realize how bad it was, kiddo,” Jack said, conversationally, as he forked leftover noodles into his mouth. “You have no idea whatsoever how to share a bed.”

Swallowing and trying to discreetly wipe his face--impossible, really, since he only had one arm right now and it was the one nearest to Jack--Rhys took several seconds to even figure out how to defend himself. 

“Lots of people get laid without having anyone sleep over.” He tried not to sound petulant, but even to his own ears he knew he’d failed.

“Yeah, sure, but _ you _ don’t. When’s the last time anyone touched your dick, babyface? If it’s within the last year, I’ll buy you a really nice pistol.”

“Hah!” Rhys immediately crowed, then remembered who he was talking to. This wasn’t Vaughn or Yvette, who might mock him without being a real risk to anything but Rhys’s pride. But having started on that note, Rhys had no choice but to continue. “I’ll have you know, I’m quite popular at the company sex parties. I mean you built Helios with all those orgy rooms for a reason.”

Jack cast a sidelong look at him, radiating skepticism. “You realize Hyperion keeps records of everyone who attends those things, right? So I can check to see if you’re telling the truth. And I _ will, _ pumpkin, because I’m embarrassed I was inside someone as terminally awkward as you.”

“Those parties require the participants to wear masks,” Rhys protested, feeling a little shiver of discomfort run over his skin, both at the idea of his employer knowing where and when he went to get laid, and the reminder of his time with Jack on Pandora. But when Rhys thought about it, he wasn’t sure why he was surprised by this new violation of his privacy. This was Hyperion, after all, and as their lawyers so often reminded people, there were no laws in deep space. Especially way out here in the Borderlands. 

“As if a mask ever stopped a biosignature scanner. Mine certainly doesn’t.”

Jack was, Rhys realized then, already fully dressed. So with that, Jack set his carton onto the coffee table and left the apartment. Just marched right out the front door without so much as a thank-you or goodbye. 

_ Well, _ Rhys thought as he used his empty sleeve to soak up his spit from the couch, _ at least he’ll buy me a really nice pistol. _

**

Later that same day, Jack did, in fact, do just that. A really, _ really _ nice pistol, and a thigh holster like Jack’s own to put it in. The package arrived at the start of Rhys’s lunch break, delivered to him right before he was about to go join Vaughn, Sasha, and Yvette. 

Sasha had come with him to work, touring the production facilities and interviewing the chief designers. Rhys had learned more about guns just by listening to her ask pointed questions than he had by attempting to read user manuals or review advertising. Sasha had left early to go back to the production line with one of the engineers, promising to meet Rhys for lunch. 

The thick black leather of his new holster and belt was smooth in Rhys’s hands. From everything Rhys had absorbed in the last few days, Rhys could tell that this gun was an expensive and beautiful killing machine. 

When Rhys arrived at the restaurant, wearing his present and ready to tell his friends all about the very strange night he had spent with Jack and the gift he’d gotten out of it, Rhys found that Jack had also gotten guns and holsters for Vaughn and Yvette. Vaughn got a sleek double chest harness and two small pistols to go in it, sized to fit his hands, and Yvette got a pretty little harness that hung from her natural waist and could be worn over pencil skirts. Hers was a larger gun, something between a shotgun and a pistol, but still beautiful and light, made from a pale metal and accentuated with iridescent purple swirls. 

Sasha held it with a look of lustful envy, biting her lower lip. Rhys had to assume that meant very good things about the weapon. 

“What am I supposed to do?” Vaughn asked, brow crinkling up in worry as he pulled one of his pistols out and held it gingerly in his palms. The glowing green lines along its shaft and sights stood out starkly against the black plastic of the table as well as the dark metal of the gun itself. “At this point it’s clear that all three of us have got _ Handsome fucking Jack _ as a sugar daddy, but I’m pretty sure that _I’m _ the one who’s gonna be expected to put out in return for all this.” Vaughn’s voice shook a little, and Rhys felt sick hearing it. “He got...really handsy yesterday after walking me back to my place. I had to tell him to stop like three separate times before he got the hint.”

Rhys hadn’t known that. He didn’t like knowing it now. There was no part of knowing it which he liked.

“Yeah, uh, about that,” Rhys said, shifting awkwardly in his seat and feeling the leather of the holster’s thigh strap pull tight as he did so. “Yeah, uh, Jack spent the night with me instead.”

At the look of disgusted betrayal Sasha shot him, Rhys held his hands up. 

“No, no, I know, okay? I _ know _ he’s not a good guy. I know.” Rhys didn’t want to know that either. He wanted Jack to still be a faraway celebrity he could masturbate to risk-free. But he wasn’t. “He came over after you went to sleep, and left before you got up. But, this is the really weird thing: he just spent the night with me? No sex. He just wanted to be...cuddled, I guess.”

Three pairs of wide eyes stared at Rhys, stunned. 

Sasha recovered first, her expression hardening into disgust again. 

“Bullshit! At least come up with a better lie than that. You expect me to believe that Handsome _fucking _ Jack got you pistols like these in response to _ cuddling? _ Do you think I’m an idiot? I knew most of Hyperion is set up to suck Jack’s dick, but I didn’t expect it to be this literal!”

“I didn’t!” Rhys protested, and the worst thing was seeing how even Vaughn didn’t believe him. Rhys turned to him. “Please, Vaughn, I didn't, I promise.”

Vaughn shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable. Which was when Rhys realized: Sasha didn’t know that the three of them were responsible for Jack being alive again. All she knew was that the terrifying CEO had returned. What if Vaughn or Yvette told her that it was Rhys’s fault?

Sasha pointed a finger at his face, shoving Yvette’s gun away across the table as though Sasha could no longer stand to touch it. “Let’s say I believe you, that you didn’t fuck him. That means he gave this to you as a reward for something else. Who did you sell out for this? Was it me, or Fiona, or a whole _ town _ down on Pandora?”

Rhys looked away. How was he supposed to tell her, or successfully _ hide _ from her, that he’d sold out literally _ everybody _ by bringing Jack back from the dead? That all three of them had?

“So, Sasha, there’s something you should know,” Yvette said. Yvette looked at Rhys, her expression unreadable. “You’re obviously aware that Handsome Jack is a lot less dead than he was a month ago.”

Well, then. Rhys supposed that they were doing this right now, in public, during his lunch break. So much for a nice meal. With his luck, the waitress would arrive with their food right when this went south, just to add further embarrassment. 

At Yvette’s opener, Sasha’s eyes narrowed. She stared holes through Rhys. He tried to somehow shrink himself out of sight, but while most of his height came from leg and he was currently sitting down, this was still not a very successful maneuver. 

“You had something to do with it, didn’t you, Rhys.”

“We all did,” Yvette sighed. She opened her mouth to continue, and Vaughn was already nodding along. But something in Rhys protested. 

He didn’t want to do this. He wanted to hide it away, keep things _ nice _ between him and Sasha. Before leaving Pandora he had lied to her and Fiona about how he’d found the Gortys beacon, knowing they would react badly to the truth. But now--now that Jack was back in the flesh, and harassing Vaughn and Rhys, and likely to just escalate from here, Rhys didn’t think he could hide this for much longer. Especially not if Sasha was going to be working at his side. What if Jack targeted her too in some way? 

“No, it’s _ my _ fault,” Rhys murmured, curling both his shaky hands down in his lap. “It’s my fault, you’re right. I found...something on Pandora that allowed Jack to come back from the dead. I brought it here because I hoped I’d get my job back. These two knew about it and helped, but it really was me.”

Sasha’s face went kind of blank, like she was thinking, or simply didn’t want to give away any response. Then she just stood up and left. 

Rhys couldn’t even make himself watch her retreating back. He didn’t want it to be the last time he saw her. His chest hurt. He felt hot under his clothes.

“That went badly,” Yvette commented. “So, in all seriousness: how do we keep Vaughn safe? Or you, I guess,” she gestured at Rhys, “but you actually like the guy.”

The answer, discussed with no pleasure over their food, was that none of them knew. Even without having accepted big favors from Jack, which they all had, all of them had been in deep shit from the moment Vasquez had airlocked Henderson. It had only escalated since Rhys had inserted the Nakayama drive into his head. 

Finally, having not eaten much yet no longer hungry at all, Rhys pushed his plate away and sat back. 

“If Jack tries to come onto you again, just send him to me,” he said at last to Vaughn, who was looking more and more stressed as time passed. Maybe it was already too late for him and Vaughn, Rhys thought. Maybe as soon as he’d brought Jack back, Rhys had lost any chance with Vaughn. Maybe at least this way, Rhys could get laid with someone hot and Vaughn could be safe. The fact that Jack’s attentions would put _ Rhys _ in greater danger seemed only fair at this point. 

But at this Vaughn just looked even unhappier. “Look, bro, I know you had the hots for him, and I tried to be fine with it when he was just a face in your posters. And I know you dated a lot of douchebags in college. But this is different.”

“I--I know,” Rhys admitted. He hated saying it out loud. He wanted everyone to be wrong--about Jack, about him, about what they’d done together, about all of it. “I know, okay? But I don’t see a better option. At least I’d enjoy it, right? Unlike you.”

Vaughn wouldn’t look at him. “Maybe we should just run away to Pandora. The Crimson Raiders are still a thing, right? Maybe they’d take us in.”

“After what we’ve done? Fat chance,” Yvette dismissed. “No, like it or not, Jack is our meal ticket now. So we’ve just gotta cope. At least right now, he likes us. A lot, obviously. These really are expensive guns.”

“And shields,” Rhys sighed. 

“And houses,” Vaughn agreed.

“And furniture,” Yvette added.

“And clothes,” Vaughn whispered, defeated.

They stared at the table together. 

It was funny, in a completely not-funny way, how such a brief time on Pandora had changed so much for Rhys. Before then, every aspect of his current situation would have been like something from his wettest dreams: he was a high-level exec with the paycheck to match, in a beautiful house in the nicest part of the station, with Handsome Jack visiting him often, giving him personalized gifts, and even _ sleeping in his bed. _ What more could Rhys want?

Well, it turned out he wanted Vaughn. And beyond that, what he had really wanted all along was just safety and respect while he made a living. But he couldn’t have that, it seemed.

Maybe no one could. 


	5. Honestly

That evening when Rhys returned from work, where he was still figuring out what being a departmental head even meant, he found Sasha sitting in his living room. 

“Hi,” he said tentatively, unsure if this was going to result in a fight. His body was already acting like it was, his heart speeding and his flesh palm sweating. He’d been anxious and unhappy all day imagining this exact conversation. His limbs hurt from the prolonged tension.

She looked up at him, holding him in her gaze for several long seconds. 

“So you brought Jack back from the dead. How?”

Okay, so they were starting there. Rhys looked away, seating himself on the couch well away from her with his hands jammed between his thighs. The metal fingers pressed against the flesh ones and hurt. 

“It was the drive I put in my head right after the Vault key deal went screwy,” he began, and took a deep breath. Something along his right collarbone started to ache right when he saw Sasha’s face change in the corner of his eye. God, she was gonna hate him so much for this. “I really, truly thought it was just a company ID drive, just like I said. But its owner had loaded an AI made from scans of Handsome Jack’s brain into it. I didn’t know right away, the AI didn’t show up till later.”

“How much later,” she asked, quiet.

“After the death race, when we fell into the Atlas basement,” Rhys said. “Then all the sudden I started--seeing Handsome Jack and hearing his voice, talking to me, to  _ us _ , when nobody else could see or hear anything. He was….” Rhys realized then he’d never actually described the hologram to anyone. “Bright blue. Life sized, but bright blue in the way holograms often are. Otherwise he looked just like he’d walked out of one of the promotional vids.”

“And you didn’t say anything to any of us,” she stated, tone cold. “No wonder you were acting so weird. So what happened then? Did you start selling us out immediately?”

Rhys wanted to protest that he hadn’t ever done that, but he knew it was a lie. Not only that she would see it that way, but that the truth was that he had. 

“Not...right away,” he gritted out. His throat hurt just saying it. When he was by himself, he could almost forget. He was good at not thinking too hard about certain things, good at redirecting his thoughts onto something else. One had to be good at compartmentalizing to survive at Hyperion. But with Sasha looking at him like that, the shame came rushing up. 

“I was scared, okay?” he protested, angry at her and feeling even worse because of it. “I was scared of him! You can’t--you have to understand what it was like, having Handsome Jack in my head, talking to me all the time. From the first moment I understood he was there, he was calling me stupid and threatening to kill me. Starting right there in the Atlas basement he called me upstairs, shouted at me, and I was so used to hearing him murder people over the loudspeakers here on Helios that I ran after him right away. It didn’t even occur to me right then that he wasn’t...real, exactly. But a minute later, I realized, and I had to tell him he was  _ dead, _ that someone had managed to kill him, and he hated it. He got so mad, thought I was being insubordinate, and he tried...”

Rhys swallowed. The words didn’t want to come out. He didn’t want them to come out. He didn’t want them to be true, not in the past and not now when he was here on Helios again. Not when Jack had spent a night in his bed, a soft body that wanted to be held--and not when Jack could lay hands on Vaughn or Yvette. 

“He tried to kill me the first time right then,” Rhys admitted, mostly to himself. “In the Atlas basement, like five minutes after meeting me. At that point, he wasn’t able to do it, but it scared me enough that I fell off the ledge.”

“‘At that point’--did that change later? He found some way to hurt you?” Sasha pressed. 

“Yeah.” Rhys pulled his right hand out from between his knees, wiggling the fingers--remembering. He didn’t want to remember, he still woke up most nights sweating, dreaming about it. “It was after Vaughn and I fell out the back of the caravan. Jack discovered he could take over my cybernetics. He took over my arm and socked me in the jaw with it, just to see if he could.”

“So, what happened after that?” she asked. 

“He made me...no. No,” Rhys started, but then he stopped himself. Swallowed against the lump in his throat. He had to be honest with Sasha, she deserved it. “I did it--I  _ chose _ to let him in even more. When we found the Gortys facility, and Vasquez and August had you and Vaughn at gunpoint. Fiona was telling me she had a plan, but all I could see was Vasquez holding Vaughn, pushing the gun up against his temple.” Rhys could feel a tremor starting along his ribs just remembering it. “I _wanted_ to believe that Fiona had a way out for us at least, but there was just no way she could protect Vaughn! There was the force-field between us, and Vasquez would absolutely kill him. And Jack was there telling me if I just let him in, if I let him have access to more of my systems, he could save everybody, keep us safe.”

“And you  _ believed _ him?”

Rhys closed his eyes. “I was scared enough,” he said, slow and painful. “And he was right--he took over the drones right away. Took over my whole body for the first time. I let him in and he moved me around like a puppet. The first time wasn’t as bad as it was later--that first time I was at least still present to some degree, could still see and feel. Later, there were times he took over so completely that I blacked out, wasn’t even...there, anymore. In my own body.”

Rhys didn’t say that there were times he still felt like that. That there were times he felt like he’d come out of his own body without even anyone to blame it on, come out the back and was looking down at himself from outside. It hadn’t been like that before. When Jack took over completely Rhys had just disappeared. Passed out, kind of. But now, he kept...drifting out. Like Jack had found a new functionality in his own brain. It was kind of happening right now--Rhys’s body didn’t feel real anymore. He hadn’t come out the back yet, but that’d probably occur soon. 

“When did that start happening?” Sasha asked. “That he took over your whole body and you didn’t know what was happening?”

“In the Biodome,” Rhys admitted, mortified. 

“Oh, right. When you smacked my ass and were a complete shithead to everyone. That makes sense.” She paused, and Rhys almost started to fill the silence. “How much of that was you? Was it Jack the whole time we were in there? Or do you even know?” 

Thinking back, it  _ felt _ so clear, when Jack had taken over and when he hadn’t. But could that be trusted? Maybe Jack had found a way to alter Rhys’s memories of the time. 

“I think it was mostly me, aside from that brief period,” he said, because it was what he needed to believe. “It was because I fell from the elevator platform. Sometimes, jarring my head--I think there was a bad connection in my temple port that got jostled sometimes when something hit my head or shook it too hard. The cybernetics people up here told me they’d had to rewire something in there. So sometimes, I’d get jostled and Jack would appear or disappear. That time, I might have actually passed out when I hit the ground, or maybe Jack just...slipped in while I wasn’t fully present.” Rhys wrinkled his nose at the sound of his own words. “Not like--nevermind. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, unfortunately,” Sasha sighed. “So, what, Jack was telling you to get back to Hyperion so you could get him a body?”

“He wanted us to take him back to Helios, yeah.” The way the next bit would look from the outside occurred to him then. “But I didn’t--I didn’t arrange this! Gortys’s beacon being in his office—I was down on the planet, there was no way I could have put it there by myself! It was just there.”

Sasha rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Jack took a lot of shit that didn’t belong to him, I get it. So when you got here, what? You just disappeared for days, and then came back and sent me and Fiona away. Were you trying to get rid of us so we wouldn’t find out what you were doing?”

“That was Jack,” Rhys whispered. “He could take me over completely by then, anytime he wanted. Not for very long at a time--he struggled with the, uh. The flesh parts of me, I guess. He could only sustain a total takeover for five minutes, ten at the outside. So I woke up later and found out he’d used my body to get you two off the station. I didn’t want that, I wanted you two here, but...” Rhys sighed. “But he’d already given you money, and I figured, better far away from here. Better far away from him.”

“Yeah, Handsome Jack hates Pandorans. We know. So then what happened?”

Rhys ran a hand through his hair. “They put him in robots at first. He could get into the whole space station, had complete control of the guns, the screens, everything--but Jack wanted a human body again. The scientists couldn’t figure out how to just replicate his old brain and body, especially not without him losing all the memories of his time in me. They maybe could have figured out a way to translate from AI memory to a human brain, given time, but Jack’s not patient, so...so he took over my body and they scanned my brain with him in it, then used the old scans of his brain used to make the AI to begin with. They...mashed them together, I guess?” Rhys laughed, utterly humorless. “Kinda weird to think that after all that time being in my brain, maybe some part of mine made it into him, huh?”

“Kinda weird, yeah,” Sasha agreed, not amused. 

Finally, Rhys looked at her again. It felt bad to do it, like she’d become some sort of idol to his shame. But she wasn’t that, he reminded himself. She was just a person who was scared and angry, like him. 

“I know,” Rhys sighed, then, because she looked--young. She was half Jack’s age. Five years younger than Rhys himself. “I  _ know, _ okay? I know it’s bad. I shouldn’t have done...any of this. I know  _ you _ wouldn’t have. I know  _ you _ —” Rhys swallowed. His mouth was running, now, and stopping it was like trying to stop a freight train. But maybe he could at least steer it a little? 

August was a sensitive topic for Sasha, that much was clear. She’d outright denied that August had meant to hurt her even after he’d pulled a gun on her and tried to shoot her multiple times. But surely that meant that if Rhys could only phrase it right, she of all people could be made to understand what it was like to trust someone dangerous. 

“When you talked about August, you said you...started to see an unexpected side of him, even though he was just a mark,” Rhys tried. “He’s a scary guy, right? Guns, extortion, major crime connections? But you spent months with him, by his side, talking to him all the time. Of course you saw something else in him, too.” Rhys looked away again, couldn’t bear the blank unresponsiveness of her face. She had so much more control over herself than he did, than he probably ever would. Henderson had told him over and over again to manage his face better, but Rhys just...couldn’t. Puppy-stupid and always hopeful, that was Rhys. Henderson had liked that about him anyway, Rhys had thought. Maybe so did Jack.

“Before Jack died, being on Helios while Jack was alive was…” Rhys searched for words. He had to get this right, he might not get a second chance to convince her. “It was like being inside his mind, all the time,” Rhys admitted at last, with a throb of pain along his breastbone. “He designed this station himself, and his personality was everywhere. His face was everywhere. Living here, working here, you couldn’t avoid getting to know him in a weird kind of way. He was scary, but...but it was spun to be kind of exciting. And working in the part of the station I did, most of the worst things he did were far away and kind of unreal. Everyone on Pandora was crazy, he said, and he was trying to make it a better place. So a lot of us figured, you use crazy to fight crazy, right? Maybe someone like him was the only way to get anything done.” Rhys shook his head. “It was stupid to believe that, I know that now. It was stupid and wrong. But it was that message day in and day out for years, Jack’s face everywhere telling you to trust him and love him and...” Rhys shut his eyes. “And he rescued us, six years ago. Helios was taken over by a rogue faction of Dahl military. They herded us into the residential quarters and kept us there for weeks. I was scared all the time, everyone was, and then just...Jack showed up for a group of five Vault hunters, killed the Lost Legion, stopped them from blowing Elpis apart and killing everyone on the moon _and_ Pandora, and so I thought--there he is, that's the man I wanna be like! He started off a mere programmer, rose to the top, and saved everyone, including me. So I fell for it! I bought it, you know? Everybody wanted to be important to Jack, so when he got in  _ my _ head, and would tell me sometimes when I did what he wanted how special I was and how much he was proud of me...” 

_ Don’t go there, _ Rhys told himself.  _ You’re trying to explain this so she’ll understand, not sound like a pathetic fanboy.  _ So he redirected, away from describing just how badly he’d wanted Jack’s approval. 

“Meanwhile, here on Hyperion, your coworkers are killing each other,” Rhys continued, determined. “You always have to watch your back, and work is never just work! There’s no relaxing, no letting your guard down. The one time I did, the one time I thought I had it made, I came into my boss’s office to find him dead, vented out an airlock, with Vasquez in his place!” Rhys hunched further over his knees, dragging in a deep breath. It made him feel more real, less like a vehicle he was piloting via ECHOnet. 

“That was the day we met, you know. It’s why I came down to Pandora. Because I’d spent years sucking up to my boss trying to get a promotion so I could be in a position to take care of Vaughn and Yvette, years of fear and effort and desperation, and then--then one man just threw it out an airlock! Just like that!” Rhys snapped his fingers, digging his metal digits into his knee. It hurt, but at least he could feel it. 

“Please, Sasha,” he finished. “I’m not asking you to be okay with what I did. I should have found some other way to get rid of him, I know. I just want--I just want you to understand _why_ this happened.”

At this, Sasha grimaced, mouth twisting into an unhappy knot and her eyes closing. Then she drew a deep breath through her nose and looked at him again. 

“You know the worst thing about all this, Rhys?” she said, sounding tired. “The worst thing is that I  _ do _ understand. I wish I didn’t.”

Rhys blinked at her, jaw hanging open. “You--you do?” He hadn’t actually expected to succeed at convincing her. 

Her face hardened again and she looked away. “What do you think it was like growing up on Pandora? Like you said, there’s no relaxing, no letting down your guard. And the one time I did trust--the one time I thought I had it made, when I thought that my _years_ of training my face and body to hide my reactions were over, when the _months_ of being with August had paid off--the man who rescued me from the streets and treated me like family swooped in, stole all the money, and then abandoned us.” She shook her head. “Felix left a message for us at his place in Hollow Point. Had the gall to say he  _ loved _ us, that he’d--that he’d  _ betrayed _ us and even told Fiona to  _ never trust anybody again _ because he was trying to  _ protect _ us.” Her fingers flexed in her lap, and Rhys realized then that she was  _ letting _ him see this reaction. She was sharing something with him by allowing that sign of being affected.

“I’ve never been so angry at anything in my life,” she continued, now with Rhys’s eyes riveted to her face. “And the worst thing--the  _ worst _ thing is that there’s a part of me that still believes that Felix loves us, even though he took all the money I earned, because at least he sent Athena to take care of us. As if that _one thing_ could make up for the _lifetime_ of safety and comfort he stole from us.”

She shook her head, spine rigidly straight. Rhys couldn’t help but see the parallel--he too kept trying to believe that all these gifts meant that Jack really  _ cared, _ and that this meant Rhys could just forget all the times Jack had hurt him. Just let it go and be safe, now.

Sasha shook her head. She didn’t meet his eyes, just stared at the carpet as she went on. “I thought somehow Hyperion would be different to its own, you know? They eat us alive down on Pandora, and the corporations fucked us up so bad that now we can’t do anything but eat each _other_ alive down there too. But I always pictured that up here, up in Helios, you were all living the cushy life, laughing at us down there. But Hyperion--and Handsome Jack--did the same shit to everybody, didn’t they? You included.”

The memory of the soft warmth of Jack’s body pushed its way into Rhys’s mind. The reprinting of Jack’s body from the scans had given him all his old scars, and Rhys had felt them under his palm. Scars on Jack’s belly and chest, down his arms and on his hands. It somehow hadn’t made sense that Jack had been so soft to the touch. 

“Yeah,” Rhys agreed, trying to push the memory away with no more success than he had trying to push away the man himself. “He did.”

“And you spent the night with him,” Sasha went on, as though reading Rhys’s mind. He couldn’t suppress a flinch. “It’s weird, sleeping with someone who scares you, isn’t it? You can kind of forget about all the awful stuff for a while. Or you can’t, which is worse.”

“He didn’t fuck me,” Rhys protested, unprepared for this level of sympathy. He’d tried so hard to get it but now he had it, he found he didn’t want Sasha to understand. He didn't want her to know what this was like. He didn't want to think about what _she'd_ been forced to do too. 

The look Sasha gave him said she didn’t believe him anyway. “Sure, whatever. For the record, August never fucked me, either. I never let him. We did other things. Didn’t stop it from being complicated and weird and way too close, though.”

“He’s still alive,” Rhys deflected, hastily changing the subject. “Or, well. He was? I don’t know what Jack did with him afterward. They took August away to the medical wing.”

Sasha blinked at him, successfully rerouted. Then she stood up from the couch. 

“I have to go,” she said, tone unreadable, and left.

**

The exhaustion from the previous night’s lack of sleep dragged Rhys into unconsciousness almost as soon as he lay down. 

Which of course meant the nightmares were waiting for him. 

Jack’s hands were so big. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and even for his build his hands here big. Long, thick fingers with heavy, scarred knuckles. The hands of a brawler.

A killer. 

Jack’s breath gusted warm and coffee-scented-sweet over Rhys’s cheek as he leaned close to whisper in Rhys’s ear, palms hot on Rhys’s throat. The tip of one thumb nestled into the space behind the corner of Rhys’s jaw, right where Jack’s own port was on his own neck, the tips of his fingers overlapping on Rhys’s nape.

“C’mon, sweetheart, just let me inside, just a little deeper. I’ll fix everything, okay? You won’t have to worry anymore now I’m here.”

The thumbs slipped across his jaw and settled over his throat. Rhys turned his face into it, straining against those hands. He couldn’t breathe but that was fine. He didn’t need to breathe. He needed this. 

“You’ve been so good for me, right? Real good. And now you’re gonna be even better. You’re gonna be _perfect,_ baby. Just nod once more, okay?”

Rhys nodded. 

Jack’s left eye was like a green star, shining in the darkness as their bodies merged together. Instead of the sweep of nothingness Rhys had felt every other time Jack had taken over, it was a rush of luxuriant heat. One-ness. Unity. 

_ Power.  _

He was gonna be perfect.

**

Waking meant blinking at the huge empty bed. It meant still smelling Jack’s cologne and aftershave and hair product on the sheets and pillows. 

It meant feeling sick and small and trapped, strapped down onto an exam table with doctors standing over him, knowing he had  _ let Jack in, _ accepted Jack’s offers, and would be expected to pay back everything he owed with interest. Someday. 

Rhys rolled over, burying his face in the pillows, his hard cock straining against his hip. 

He wanted to suffocate. Even minus real hands around his throat, he’d die just the same, wouldn’t he? Could he just lie here, sucking air through the pillow till he passed out and died?

Images flashed through his mind and across his skin, ghostly yet palpable. 

Vaughn’s lips and the scratch of his goatee. Jack’s hair crunching out of its product beneath Rhys’s fingers. Sasha’s small fingers winding between his. The thick wet slide of Jack into him. The tiny sick vibrations running through his skull as the cybernetics team inserted another drive into his port. 

Rhys shoved himself up away from the mattress with a gasp, dizzy and desperate to get away. Or to go back for more? He wanted to lie back down and never get up. And he wanted to run away. 

Instead he sat up in bed until his dick calmed down. Then he went to look for Sasha.

She was nowhere in the house. Rhys double-checked, just to be sure, and then called her. 

She sent it straight to voicemail, but a moment later a text flashed up in his HUD:  _ I’m at the detention center. I’ll find you later. _

Rhys reread it twice before dismissing it out of his vision. 

The detention center rather than the medical wing. Which probably meant that August was alive and had been released right into the holding cells. Had Sasha stayed with him overnight? Did August mean that much to her? Rhys wasn’t sure what to do with this information, or with himself in regards to it. 

In the past, Rhys would have just ignored it, forgotten about it and gone about his day and only addressed it later when it became a problem. But...that policy had gotten him here. 

So instead, Rhys ordered food and paid extra to have it delivered to Sasha even though the delivery guy didn’t want to go to the detention center. Rhys ordered enough food that August could have a meal too if he wanted it. 

Then Rhys texted her:  _ Let me know if you need anything. _

It didn’t fix anything that was wrong. But, he hoped, it might keep one thing from getting worse. 


	6. Confession

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for some "mild" self-harm in this chapter.

Rhys tried to work, but his focus that day was shot. He kept hearing the thunk of bullets hitting shields, seeing the grotesque splatter of viscera and brains across metal sheeting, remembering Sasha’s look of disgust. They swirled together with a hundred other bad experiences into a knot that sat in his belly and kept him from breathing. He felt like he was drowning. Or choking. 

Worse still, the inability to get a damn breath just reminded him of Jack. When would they hear from him again? Was he with Vaughn right now? Why the hell would Jack suddenly decide to chase after Vaughn anyway? 

As Rhys sat doodling in the margin of a distribution report his new PA had given him, the question clicked into place in his mind. Why _would_ Jack suddenly decide to chase after Vaughn?

Rhys blinked, and time seemed to still. The idea that had just formed sat chilly inside him like an ice cube and raised gooseflesh all over his body. He thought it through again, just in case it turned out better this time.

It didn’t.

The facts cycled around and around in Rhys's head. He sat back in his chair (black leather and beautiful, everything an executive could want so long as he wasn’t an overblown megalomaniac like Jack) and took stock. 

They had scanned Rhys’s brain to make Jack’s new one. Jack had been the one _ using _ the brain at the time, but...but they had scanned _ Rhys’s _ brain. _ Rhys’s brain _ had been one of the templates for _ remaking Jack. _

And since being resurrected--since getting a new brain based on scans taken from Rhys--Jack had suddenly become almost...generous. Seemingly quite attached to Rhys and his two best friends. Protective of them. Disturbed at the sight of gore. And...

...attracted to Vaughn. 

Rhys had known this whole time that his brain scans had gone into digistructing a new body for Jack, but it had never occurred to him that the scientists had recreated _ Handsome Jack _ with _ Rhys Strongfork _ as a template. 

Rhys stared at the wall. His own heartbeat felt incongruous against the staggering horror of the realization. Surely something this bad should have killed him instantly?

Rhys had known the scientists had been rushed. He had known they were terrified, prepared at any moment for Jack’s turrets or robots (or Rhys’s own hands) to kill them in brutal and disgusting ways. Rhys had known that one of the scientists had already been murdered by Jack, thus putting the others in even greater fear, before they chose this as their final option. And Rhys knew, of course, that many people were not at their best when pants-shittingly terrified. 

But he had nonetheless assumed that they would have vetted this procedure. Edited the scans to only upload whatever parts of Rhys’s neural map included recent memories. Removed any trace of him from contaminating the resulting new brain. Except now, it seemed obvious that they hadn't. 

For about an hour, Rhys tried to continue doing his work. But he kept interrupting himself to get up and pace around his spacious new office. This idea couldn't possibly be right, could it? 

But the longer he thought about it, the more certain he was. 

Which meant that sooner or later, Jack would figure it out too. If he hadn’t already. Rhys couldn’t even imagine what the man would do when he realized. Burning Rhys alive was a real option. As was venting the entire science department, Yvette included, into space. 

Except...

Except...

Except _ Rhys _ wouldn’t do that, would he?

Rhys shook himself, dismissing the thought. It was not a good idea to rely on Jack’s goodwill or conscience no matter what his neurological setup. Especially not when lives were on the line. 

Which meant safety plans. 

Rhys placed an immediate order for a set of four O2 kits, the most discreet ones he could find with the longest supply of air. It was expensive, disturbingly so, and nearly emptied Rhys’s savings account. 

What was left, Rhys transferred to an account in one of the few remaining Hyperion-owned banks on Pandora. He could still access it from up here, but now it was accessible from the planet’s surface as well.

Then Rhys used credit to buy more ammunition for his pistol, and lastly, he started writing a jailbreak program for his tech. The problem there was that he was good but Jack was better. Rhys would have to really work on this, and keep it well away from the company servers.

...insofar as that was even possible, given that Jack had been inside his head and could theoretically reconnect to it at any time. They both had ports--all Jack would need to do was hook them both up. Fuck. 

Well, Rhys had to at least try. 

In the end he had to set the project aside to actually do his new job. But that was ok anyway, since he shouldn’t work on his jailbreak program where Jack could see. There were security cameras in the arms department to keep employees from stealing the stock, so Rhys was always being recorded.

...not that that the presence of visible cameras meant anything. Maybe Jack had installed micro-cameras in Rhys’s house. Maybe Jack had left behind spyware in Rhys’s own head and was looking out of Rhys’s own eye right now. He couldn’t put _ anything _ past Jack.

A small voice in the back of Rhys’s mind that sounded suspiciously like Jack himself said that Rhys was being paranoid, that Jack had treated him well and deserved better than this kind of suspicion. 

A part of Rhys still loved Jack. But the rest of Rhys knew he couldn’t trust the man. He’d known that since before Jack had even died. He’d known that even when he chose to trust Jack anyway, because the alternative was sudden and horrific death for people he cared about. 

Vaughn was right, Rhys had dated a lot of assholes in college, and several times while at Hyperion as well. He attracted them. In his worst moments, he couldn’t help but think that the matching ugliness in him was appealing to them. That, or he was just stupid and hopeful enough to be a perfect victim. 

But Rhys liked to think he’d finally gotten wise. While a _ part _ of him still loved Jack, the rest of him was going to make backup plans. 

**

At lunch, Rhys went to the detention center himself. When he finally found Sasha and August, he also found Jack there as well. Jack spotted Rhys first, rolling his eyes at the sight of him coming down the hall. 

“You turn up like a bad penny, princess,” he sighed. “Someday you’re gonna have to learn to leave me alone.”

That was as fine an example of projection as one could ever hope to see, but Rhys kept that in. 

“What’re you doing down here?” he asked instead. 

Handsome Jack stood just outside the force-field doors, Sasha several feet to his left. The force-field made it difficult to make out details, but though August’s shirt was charred and falling off half his chest, he didn’t look injured anymore. Probably the medical teams had given him a few Anshins before sending him down to detention. 

“Well, your Pandoran _ consultant _ here,” Jack emphasized the word in such a way that it sounded like an insult, “has been standing vigil at this asshole’s side and hassling the guards for petty bullshit.”

“Making sure he’s given water is not petty bullshit,” Sasha interjected, but Jack just waved this away. Rhys felt even gladder he’d sent food over for both of them, because if water was an issue, food definitely would have been. He could see some of the cartons on the floor both outside and inside the barrier.

“My double asked him all sorts of questions yesterday when they brought him in," Jack continued. "I read the report this morning, and then saw the reports from the guards, and I figured I had to know what could be so great about this creep that even after kidnapping your consultant here, she’d still defend him.”

“She doesn’t have to like him to believe he doesn’t deserve to die of thirst in here,” Rhys said mildly. The look of relief Sasha shot him made up for the look of disgust on Jack’s face. 

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Jack sneered, lip curling. “This bandit invaded my station, shot up my docking bay and employees, and kidnapped your girlfriend here. You think he deserves _ anything _ after that?”

“I’m standing right here,” August interrupted, right as Sasha protested, “I’m not his girlfriend!”

“So, _ has _ he gotten any water yet?” Rhys asked, ignoring the hurt he felt at Sasha’s immediate refutation of him. They _ weren’t _ dating, it was fine. 

Jack rolled his eyes. “Ugh, yes, my guards are weak bitches who should be fired,” he griped. “They’ve given him water more than once, even! Shows a depressing lack of discipline that they can be taken in by Pandorans this way.”

Jack was being unreasonable, of course, but he also _wasn’t_ being violent. So, with the horrible realization of that morning swimming around Rhys's mind like a kraken, Rhys pushed his luck again. 

_ “I _ think it’s a commendable commitment to human rights that should be promoted in your employees, but sure.” He moved closer to Jack, trying not to imagine those hands around his throat. The images from his dream resurfaced and Rhys pushed them away. “So, why _ are _ you down here?”

At this, Jack looked at Rhys and smiled, uncrossing his arms to wrap one around Rhys’s side. Their bodies slotted together, the leather of Jack’s coat cool against the back of Rhys’s cybernetic shoulder.

“Well among other things, I had to change the code of the release mechanism of the cells so your _ consultant _ couldn’t just let this bandit out. So I came down here to double check that the new code works. The jail was not designed with the idea of visitors in mind. It was designed so I could talk to people before I airlock them.” August didn’t flinch at this, which Rhys found impressive. Jack seemed to think for a moment, then continued, “Or so I could just forget about them down here till they died. Whichever came first.”

August shrugged. “Makes sense. Why bother wasting resources to keep people alive when they might stab you in the back later?”

At this, Jack waved a hand at August, smiling. He shook Rhys, fingers digging into the soft skin of Rhys’s belly. 

“See, baby? This guy gets it!”

“Though, with that said, I would prefer to stay alive,” August added. “I already told you--or your double, or whoever--I don’t have any beef with you or this station. I just came for the Vault key.” 

“I like this guy,” Jack purred, making full eye-contact with August the whole time he did it. Rhys squirmed with discomfort even watching it happen, but August just held the stare, one eyebrow lifted. 

“Yeah? So how about you let me out?” August asked.

Jack grinned, shaking his head as if August were a naughty child. 

“No, you’re gonna sit tight in there while I check out some things.” At this, Jack turned to Sasha, who looked up at him with a wide-eyed, willing expression that would have fooled Rhys if he didn’t already know she wanted to kill the man. “Speaking of, you and I need to have a chat, babycakes. Rhys thinks you’re quite an expert in many things. C’mon, let’s go to my office.” 

“Do you...want me to come with you?” Rhys asked, desperate to keep Jack away from her.

“Nope!” Jack dismissed.

More words bubbled up the back of Rhys’s throat. He searched his mind for anything to say to rescue Sasha from this fate, but in the end, he was left silent, staring after them, feeling sick.

“She’ll be fine,” August stated, after they’d disappeared into the elevator. “She had me fooled for six months. Me! For six months! I’m a suspicious guy, y’know. So she can handle that piece of work for a little while.”

“Yeah, but...” Rhys started to say, and then when August scowled at him, finished lamely, “But she shouldn’t _have_ to.”

At this August sighed. “Maybe,” he admitted. A second passed, and then his gaze swung to Rhys. “Are you fucking her?”

“What? No!” Rhys gasped, train of thought suddenly rerouted. “Why? Why would you think that? Did she--did she say something? About me?”

August rolled his eyes. He leaned against the side of his cell, crossing his arms. “Calm your tits, jeez. What we talked about is none of your business.”

“It kinda is, though,” Rhys said without thinking, and then at the ugly look in August’s eyes, Rhys continued, “Because she’s my _ friend. _ I’m worried about her. You’re a scary guy, okay? You _ shot _ at her, you tried to _ kill _ her, and now she’s sticking her neck out for you, protecting you, even though you _ just _ kidnapped her and then tried to kill a bunch of people, including me! So yeah, I’m concerned what you two talked about. Normally it might not be any of my business, but since I give a shit about her and I’m not sure you do, I’m asking!”

August had the grace to look abashed at this. “When I shot at her, I was mad, okay? She’d just backstabbed me!”

“Nice excuse. Still a murder attempt.”

“She lied to me the entire time we were together!” August hissed, pushing up off the wall and coming right up to the force-field. Rhys assumed he would have gotten right up in Rhys’s face if he could. “I don’t have to explain myself to you, asshole. I don’t know why you even trust her either!”

Rhys stared at him. “Do you even hear yourself? She just stayed up all night making sure you didn’t get airlocked or left to die of thirst. You know Jack would have done that, right? He doesn’t give a shit about you.”

At this, August deflated. He jammed his hands into his pockets and stood swaying for several seconds. “I know," he said at last. "Bastard shot my mom to death right next to me.”

Rhys winced. He didn’t like this guy, much less his mother, but that was still pretty awful.

“Not that I really blame him for that," August said, "I know my mom was a piece of work. Even I was scared of her. I thought she’d kill me over this whole Vault Key deal.” August snorted. “Maybe Handsome Jack even did me a favor.”

“And Sasha?” Rhys pressed. “She’s _definitely_ doing you a favor.”

August was silent for a long time. Then he thumped his weight against the wall again, this time with his side turned to Rhys. 

“Yeah, she is,” August grumbled. “It’s just--she told me last night we were never getting back together, but she’s fucking saving my _life_ here, even after everything. Makes me kinda wish...y’know.”

“That she wanted to be with you? Yeah, I get it.”

“I’d shoot you for that if I weren’t in here,” August said, tone calm as anything. 

“I don’t even--” Rhys started to say, then backtracked and made himself take a breath. He hated this weasel of a man, but Sasha cared about him, for whatever reason. If Rhys didn’t want to wreck things with Sasha like August had, Rhys had to be different. 

“First of all, quit it with the pointless death threats. It’s not cool,” Rhys said, because that needed to be gotten out of the way. He was really sick of men threatening to kill him. “Second, yeah, she’s amazing, I see it too.” August started to look thunderous, but Rhys just kept on going. “Hell, given enough time and trust, I probably would fall for her, just like you did. But I’m already in love with someone else, and I’m already being a dumbass about that. I don’t need a second person to make a fool of myself over, okay? But more importantly, it isn’t a competition anyway! She gets to choose who she’s with or not, and neither of us really get any say in it.”

He didn’t know why he’d admitted being in love. He wished he hadn’t, now. August wasn’t the kind of man you showed weakness to. But August seemed to relax upon hearing it. 

“I don’t like that you’re right, but I gotta respect that you are.”

At this sign of accord, Rhys sighed, because he knew what had to be said next. “Look. If Sasha wants you alive, I’ll help. I’ll put in a good word for you with Jack, even though your group just tried to kill me, too. I’ll have food and water delivered in here every day if I have to. But outside of this one lunch hour, I'm not sitting vigil for you, and if you hurt her in any way, I _ will _ let Jack airlock you. Hell, I’ll shoot you myself.” _ And probably throw up afterward if any insides became outsides, _ he thought privately, but he wasn’t gonna say that aloud. 

They regarded one another. 

“Deal,” August decided. “Same goes for you, though. You so much as _ look _ at her in a way she doesn’t like, I’ll pull your guts out.”

“Graphic, and unnecessary,” Rhys sighed. But that was that. 

It only took a few quick emails to have some chairs delivered from upstairs, and once Rhys had thanked his PA for bringing them down, Rhys talked the guards into lowering the barrier for long enough to put one of them into August’s cell. They kept their guns trained on August the whole time, but they did allow it. 

It was a tiny cell, and completely blank. No toilet, no sink, no bed, nothing. The detention center really had not been designed for anything but the brief delay of death. 

Rhys took the other chair, then texted Sasha to let her know he was here, keeping watch. Since August didn’t seem inclined to talk any further, Rhys continued his work on his jailbreak program. 

Five minutes before Rhys’s lunch was supposed to be over, Sasha returned. He thought of asking her if she was okay, if Jack had said or done anything bad to her, but then realized she might not want to say it in front of August. 

“Anything you need?” he asked instead. 

“Some drawing paper, a pen, and the blueprints for as many top-of-the-line guns as you can get your hands on,” she replied immediately. “I wanna start work on the gun Hyperion is gonna make just for me.”

It wasn’t what he’d been expecting, but Rhys just nodded and got it done. 

**

The rest of the day passed in relative quiet. No further attempts on anyone’s life, no further harassment from Jack, just Rhys quietly doing his work. Sasha called in the afternoon to say that Jack had released August into house arrest elsewhere in Helios. She wasn't allowed to see him anymore, apparently, until Jack decided how to proceed. 

It was a remarkable example of tolerance, given Jack's normal modus operandi, and further cemented Rhys's grim belief about the changes in Jack. 

By the time Rhys finished his own work and returned to his abode, Sasha was asleep in her room. 

Emboldened by his success in explaining himself to Sasha, Rhys went over to Vaughn’s place. Vaughn looked amazing today too, this time in a phenomenal little blue and green outfit. (Jack’s tailors really were the best. Rhys expended a herculean effort not to stare.)

They ate dinner together, but right when Vaughn suggested they maybe watch a movie to occupy their evening, Rhys finally realized that this was it. This was the time to do it. 

Part of him felt relieved. One way or another it would be over soon. 

The rest of him felt like he was facing execution. 

“I need you to promise not to be mad at me for something,” he started, and Vaughn’s eyes went wide and panicked. 

“Oh my god, Rhys, did you actually fuck him this time?”

“What? No!” Rhys protested. He was already making a hash of this. But he never had figured out what seemed like the right way to say it, so maybe it was just doomed. With Jack involved, that was probably true. “No, I have not today and have never previously fucked Handsome Jack!”

The way Vaughn’s brows wrinkled up suggested he didn’t believe it this time any more than he had before. 

“No, this...this isn’t about him,” Rhys persisted. “It’s about someone else, okay?”

At this, Vaughn closed his eyes. 

“It’s Sasha, isn’t it,” he said, the words slow and painful-sounding. 

Rhys blinked at the other man, unsure what to make of this response. “No?” he ventured after a pause. “Why does everyone think I want to date her?”

“Because your crushes are never subtle, man,” Vaughn sighed, eyes lifting to meet Rhys’s. “You are super, duper obvious when you like someone.”

Rhys’s cheeks heated. This was already going _so_ badly. 

“Yeah, I mean--I like her, obviously, she’s a great person, and maybe if circumstances were different--but no, I'm not trying to date her! And no, I’m not always obvious!”

Vaughn sat back in his chair. “Yes, you are, but if you insist, we can pretend that's not true. So what is this about?”

“Well...well it _is_ about someone I like,” Rhys tried again, already berating himself for how pathetic and middle school it was. “But I mean it. You have to promise not to be mad at me.”

Vaughn’s face pinched up, anxious and unhappy. “You’re worrying me, bro. But...I’ll try? If it’s some complete asshole again, though, I can’t promise how I’ll respond.”

“That’s really not the problem,” Rhys said, and now his voice was audibly shaking, which was terrible. His flesh palm was so sweaty but he felt cold under his clothes. 

He felt himself coming out of his own skin, anticipating how badly this would go, and dropped his metal hand into his lap to dig his fingers into his thigh. The bruising pressure of it brought him back, just a little. A deep breath helped a little more. 

“I’m in love with you,” he blurted at last, solely to stop himself from saying anything stupider. Then he dragged his eyes up to Vaughn’s face, desperate to know what the response would be. 

Vaugh’s eyes squinted, and he stared at Rhys in perplexed silence for what felt like an eternity. 

“I know we joke a lot about having kids together and stuff, but having fun at my expense, especially when I’m already so stressed, is in very poor taste,” Vaughn said at last. 

Rhys dropped his head onto the table. It hit the expensive wood surface with a thunk, and all Rhys could think was that if Jack was still inside him, he would have just jarred the AI loose. 

“I’m not joking,” he choked out, and squeezed his leg harder. It hurt a lot. He’d probably have visible marks tomorrow. 

Rhys could tell by the sound when Vaughn sat back in his chair. 

“You--you’re _not_ joking? You’re not...joking.” Vaughn sounded uncertain. 

“I’m in love with you,” Rhys repeated again, still face-down, this time in a much smaller voice. He stayed there for several more seconds before finally drawing himself up. He couldn’t look at Vaughn again this time, so he just took another deep breath. “If you hate it, or don’t return my feelings or whatever, that’s fine. I’ll still be your friend.”

Another agonizing silence followed. This was torture. Rhys wouldn’t have pegged Vaughn for a sadist, but maybe Vaughn was gonna turn out to be a consistent example of type alongside several of Rhys’s ex-boyfriends. 

“Is this because of my abs?" Vaughn asked then. "Because I don’t really like the idea of you just wanting my body. I mean it’s a nice body, I work hard on it, but--”

“No, it’s not your goddamn abs!” Rhys almost shouted, the terror and stress of the last few days finally getting to him all at once. “You’ve been my best friend for a decade! You attacked a mob boss to protect me and our friends! Hell, you embezzled ten _ million _ dollars from the scariest corporation in the galaxy and yet still agonize over impulse purchases of five dollars! You love technology that does a zillion things at once, which is why you have a necktie that's also an ECHO device and a camera, and a watch that's also a calculator! I could go on all day! There’s a lot about you to love, man, I don’t...I don’t know what you want me to say.” 

Rhys gasped a breath. Then he realized all at once that he had been waving his arms like a madman, and hastily tucked them both between his knees. He coughed, his face hot. 

“The abs are just the cherry on a very nice sundae, is my point,” he finished, mortified. “So, I mean...what do you think?”

When he snuck a glance at Vaughn again, Vaughn was just staring at him, blue eyes wide behind his glasses.

“I don’t--” Vaughn began, then shook his head a little. Rhys’s heart fell. “I don’t know what to think? I mean I don’t...I haven’t really dated much? You know that.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Rhys asked, curious even though he also felt like he was dying. True, in the whole decade they’d known each other, Vaughn had only ever dated one guy. It had lasted almost two years, though, and ended amicably even if they weren’t close anymore. But Rhys had figured the scarcity of partners was because Vaughn had just been too busy and shy in college, and then once they were at Hyperion, that finding decent men was very, very difficult. 

“I’m not like you, Rhys,” Vaughn said, sounding a little panicked himself. “You fall in love so easily, and I can’t even begin to understand what that’s like. And you just--you look at people and know if you want to fuck them! Right away! I don’t know how you can possibly want to do that when you hardly know them! You go to sex parties and _ fuck _ people you’ve literally never met before, and I don’t understand!”

“Are you saying...are you saying you don’t like me back because I’m a slut?” Rhys ventured, feeling nauseated. Of all the responses he had considered that would have been horrible, this hadn’t been among them. 

“No, of course not, that’s not even remotely--” Vaughn began, and then cut himself off. He bit his lower lip, fiddling with the strap of his Atlasio as he stared at Rhys, who stared back. He looked almost frightened. “No, I mean--fuck, I don’t even know what love is supposed to feel like! I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced love? How am I supposed to tell?”

“What?” Rhys said, squinting at the other man. “You were so cute with your ex! Like, you two were _ adorable.” _

They had been, too. Looking back, Rhys could see he’d been jealous, though he hadn’t realized it at the time. He’d just known it made him really uncomfortable to be around Vaughn and his then-boyfriend. But even so, Rhys hadn’t been able to avoid seeing how sweet they were to each other. Gentle and affectionate, a true rarity on Helios. And they’d held hands _ all the time. _ And kissed. And cuddled. It had been kind of a lot to watch, honestly. 

“He was great, but this...this whole _ thing _ of mine is why we broke up,” Vaughn admitted. “He was like, super in love with me? He wanted to get married and have my babies, man! I didn’t...I mean I liked him so much, I would have been happy to stay with him, but I didn’t feel like _ that, _ you know? I’ve never felt like that. At least, I don’t _think_ so? So we broke up.”

This whole conversation had taken a strange turn. Rhys made himself sit still in his chair and try not to scream or cry or demand a more solid answer. 

“I never knew that,” was all he could think to say. 

“I never told you,” Vaughn replied. “I didn’t want you thinking...that I’m broken. Or weird.”

“So are you...upset that I’m in love with you?” Rhys asked. His shoulders and chest hurt. He was gonna get so, so drunk after this, no matter the outcome. 

“No?” Vaughn said, sounding uncertain. “I mean it’s...I kinda like the idea, honestly,” he admitted, and went bright pink as he said it. “I’ve always _really_ admired you. And you’re easy on the eyes.”

That sounded a lot better. But it certainly wasn’t ‘I love you back.’

“So…” Rhys didn’t want to pressure Vaughn. Handsome Jack was doing more than enough of that already. But Rhys also didn’t like being left uncertain of where they stood. Under the table, he rubbed at the sore spots his metal fingers had left, digging his thumb into one as he went. 

“So, I maybe need some time to process,” Vaughn said, sounding equally embarrassed. “I mean I’ve had thoughts about you? Mostly while masturbating.” Rhys blinked, uncertain he’d heard that right because it was so unlike everything else being said. “Is that the same as having a crush? Because I have definitely thought a lot about your foreskin.”

“Wow,” Rhys wheezed. His cheeks heated. 

“But when people talk about crushes, they talk about, I dunno, writing that person’s name in their notebooks surrounded with hearts and shit like that,” Vaughn went on, leaning forward in his seat and seeming to warm to the topic now they’d started. “I’ve never done that! And bodies are kind of gross, y’know. Not yours, yours is amazing, obviously. But I’ve never really understood how to tell whether I want to fuck someone or _be_ them, you know? It’s why I started working out. I hoped it’d become clear if I got buff, because then I'd have a hot body and I could cross off that option. But it’s still not clear? I still can’t really tell if I wanna put my whole hand inside you or just be taller.”

“Wow,” Rhys repeated, with feeling. He felt like he was on fire now. “This escalated quickly.” 

“I mean I have very small hands, I could probably make it work,” Vaughn continued. “I did it a lot with my ex, he loved that. Would you love that? Whatever, it’s a moot point, I don’t even know if I…” He finally paused, rubbing one thumb along the other, fiddling with his writing callus. “What would you even want from a relationship?” 

“Jeez, way to put me back on the hotseat,” Rhys mumbled. He still wasn’t over the whole foreskin and fisting thing. He wasn’t sure how to answer anyway. It seemed rude to just say ‘normal dating things,’ since it seemed like maybe Vaughn didn’t know what that meant. 

So Rhys settled for the things he did know. 

“I want to live with you again. I think...I think Jack wanted us apart because he wants you for himself. But I already miss you, man. Even if we see each other every day, it’s not the same.”

At this Vaughn smiled, expression soft and fond. “Aww. I thought it was just me. Well, so far so good then! It’s not like we don’t have enough space, so we can live together anytime. Well,” his face fell, “assuming Jack doesn’t airlock you for putting the moves on me.”

“Assuming that, yeah,” Rhys agreed. Privately he thought that Jack wouldn’t do that, maybe thanks to Rhys’s own moral qualms, but he knew voicing that hope aloud would just make him sound even more brainwashed. So he kept it to himself. 

“So what else?” Vaughn pressed. “There’s more to dating than just living together, obviously.”

“I mean I want...” Rhys’s face heated again, this time spreading all the way out to his ears. Clearly he’d been spending too much time around men like Vasquez, because admitting what he actually wanted seemed somehow taboo. Too soft and embarrassing. “I want all the things you used to do with your ex,” Rhys managed. “You two were so affectionate. You were always in his lap during movie nights, and you held his hand everywhere you went, and there was, y’know. A lot of kissing.”

Vaughn let out an amused little huff. “Yeah. Yeah there was. Man, I really miss that. That was one of the hardest parts of breaking up, was going back to being untouched.”

Rhys nodded. That, he certainly understood. Sometimes half the reason he went to the company sex parties was that if he fucked people they’d usually let him cuddle afterward. He also went for the orgasms, of course, and sometimes for networking, but the cuddling was important. 

“Do you even want sex?” Vaughn asked. 

Rhys went redder still. “I mean...yeah. Yeah I definitely do.” 

He was looking at Vaughn’s hands now. They _were_ so very small, weren’t they. He’d never really thought about it before; taking a whole hand had always seemed like an extreme thing to do. But then, so were some of the things he’d done with complete strangers at parties, or with shitty exes whom he should never have trusted at all. Rhys would probably let Vaughn do anything he wanted. 

“I liked sex when I had it,” Vaughn offered, leaning forward again. “I don’t wanna have it with just anyone, especially not strangers. And it’s gross if I think about it too hard, sometimes. But sex with you sounds pretty great, actually.”

“So...what’s the problem then?” Rhys asked, confused. “If you want all the affection, and the sex, and you want to live with me, that sounds like you love me back?”

“I dunno, maybe?” Vaughn gave a slow shrug, hands palm-up. “People talk about love like they’re in pain, or suffering. Or like they’re high? Or like they’re suffering but it’s getting them high. And everybody says love gives their lives meaning. And I’ve never felt that? The closest I’ve ever gotten is--" Vaughn blushed now too, "--well, it’s been _you._ I really hate imagining life without you, and I’ve done a lot of very stupid things for you.” He laughed. “So maybe I am in love with you too?”

Tentatively, Rhys reached out with his left hand to take one of Vaughn’s. Vaughn’s hand was dry and warm against Rhys’s cold, clammy one, which was mortifying. But Vaughn just smiled down at the sight of their hands together. 

“Do you…” Vaughn looked nervous now. “Look, I am gonna need some time to process. I know you’re probably freaking out that I can’t give you a definite answer, but I’m not upset, and it’s not freaking _me_ out. But maybe...maybe we could try a few things together, and I can see how they feel.”

Rhys’s mind immediately filled with saucy images, especially of hands. “Like what?” he managed, voice breaking only a little. 

“I dunno. We could spend the night together, maybe.”

At that Rhys looked away, giving an awkward laugh. “Maybe, uh, maybe _not_ that. I’d just think of Jack.” He didn’t add, _ And I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of you by not being able to sleep at all, like I did with him. _

Vaughn grimaced. “Right. Okay. Well, at least I can spend the night in your place, though, right? So we can have breakfast together.”

Rhys immediately agreed. 

A few hours later, having watched a movie together after all and held hands the whole time, they were back to brushing their teeth side by side in the master bathroom of Rhys’s house. It was embarrassing how relieved Rhys felt just having Vaughn back in a shared space with him. Rhys wondered if perhaps he shouldn’t feel this warm and sticky just from brushing teeth together, which was an unsexy and unromantic activity. But they knew each other’s rhythms and routines, knew how to move with and around one another, and just the fact of Vaughn’s presence in the massive space made the rooms feel warmer. More like home. 

They slept separately but ate breakfast together with Sasha, and it felt good. Like family. 

The relief kept washing over Rhys in waves. He'd said what he needed to. Whether or not Vaughn felt anything in return, he supposed they’d find out, but at least it was _done,_ and he hadn’t ruined everything. 

Given how things had been going lately, Rhys was going to take that as a major win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The headcanon that Vaughn is somewhere on the aro/ace/demi spectrum comes partly from canon. There is at least one piece of cut dialog in which Vaughn describes nudity as disgusting and says he does not want to see naked people, and a longer piece of cut content in which Vaughn calls Rhys while Rhys is back on Helios and Vaughn is down on Pandora. In that long phone call, Vaughn says he has "never really experienced love," describes some childhood/teenaged experimentation, but also seems like he's confessing that he's into Rhys in some way. If you want to hear the cut content and see a [fantastic 'what if' SFM animation of Rhys's reaction to this call](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFbvz0azYlM), click that link!!

**Author's Note:**

> Comments, especially ones speculating about what will happen next, inspire me to write more. So, y'know. If you want more chapters, try commenting.


End file.
